“I tell my students all the time, ‘You can do hard things,’” Harris-Nelson said. “You just have to put forth the effort and try. … I think back to one of my favorite teachers who really pushed me, inspired me by setting high expectations and really just seeing I had potential to do things that were hard and made me realize, okay, this is something I want to do for others as well.”
Harris-Nelson was one of four finalists for the 2025 North Dakota Teacher of the Year award, after being named the Ward County Teacher of the Year. She was also honored with the Excellence in Holistic Education Award in 2024, for the outstanding work she’s done to incorporate social-emotional learning into her work as a music educator.
“Music is social,” she said. “Music is emotional. I said, I can bring that into the music education world. And that's what I did from day one, three and a half years ago. I just brought that those literacy pieces, those writing pieces, the social-emotional learning pieces, and kind of integrated it into the music education program here at Kenmare.”
“Music is social. Music is emotional. I can bring that into the music education world. And that's what I did from day one, three and a half years ago. I just brought that those literacy pieces, those writing pieces, the social-emotional learning pieces, and kind of integrated it into the music education program here at Kenmare.”
Harris-Nelson admits to occasionally having feelings of “imposter syndrome, since she doesn’t have a background in music education. She grew up in Kenmare, then got bachelor’s degrees in Elementary Education and Early Childhood Education from the University of Mary, in Bismarck. Her career in education started as a kindergarten teacher at Northridge Elementary, also in Bismarck. After six years there, she became engaged to marry her now-husband, Clay, who is a rancher in Kenmare, and made the decision to move back home.
When she searched online for available positions in education, the only available opportunity was teaching music. “I had so much doubt, imposter syndrome, and fear of failure,” she said. “I remember being so nervous and Googling ‘singing lessons,’ ‘piano lessons,’ ‘ukelele lessons,’ anything to help me become proficient in this area of education or provide that I knew what I was doing.”
Fast-forward to three years later, and Harris-Nelson has all the proof anyone could ask for that she does, in fact, know what she is doing. “I do struggle with that imposter syndrome,” she said, “but it's been great because I'm so confident in my social-emotional teaching, and the aspects of that, (which) I bring into this program here. So, to be recognized as somebody that just took a leap of faith to do something out of their comfort zone, that has really changed my life as a person.”
