The Good Fight
Five Educational Campaigners
Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary System
Launched in 1991, this hands-on program is aimed at getting America’s school kids outside and learning about the natural world. “We don’t want kids to think of the environment as the nature center they visit twice a year on class field trips,” says Joellen Zeh, staff ecologist with the sanctuary program’s parent organization, Audubon International. “The environment is all around us.” About 90 percent of the 153 member schools are “adopted” by golf courses and other businesses, which pay all membership fees.
Through the program, kids are learning how to do everything from “naturalizing” parts of their school grounds and designing nature trails to creating a bird feeding station and monitoring nest boxes. Even urban schools get involved, by building a container butterfly garden or just studying spiders and other insect life. At Hobe Sound Elementary School in Florida, which joined the program in 1994, a rundown school building and grounds have been transformed with an environmental education curriculum that involves the whole community, including parents, teachers and administrators. Kids are cultivating native plants and building butterfly and hummingbird habitats, and learning a lot more about the environment than they ever would by sitting in a classroom.
CONTACT
The Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program
46 Rarick Road
Selkirk, NY 12158
Tel: (518) 767-9051
The Institute for Earth Education
This Illinois-based institute teaches people “to understand our relationship with our planet, and to make much-needed changes to our lifestyles,” said Laurie Farber, international membership coordinator. Growing out of a series of college- and camp-based workshops in 1974, Earth Education creates complete education programs to help children from 10 to 14 (and, soon, both older and younger kids) learn about basic ecological processes and the interconnectedness of all life. Programs with colorful names like Sunship Earth, Earth Caretakers and Earthkeepers now reach tens of thousands of kids a year in schools, nature centers and parks from Australia to Scotland.
CONTACT
Institute for Earth Education
Cedar Cove
Greenville, WV 24945
Tel: (304) 832-6404
URL: http://www.eartheducation.org
Project Learning Tree
More than 30 states require environmental education programs, but who’s going to teach the teachers? That’s where Washington-based Project Learning Tree (PLT) comes in. PLT holds educator workshop programs in all 50 states and eight foreign countries (Japan and Brazil included), and the more than 40,000 teachers who pass through each year come home with a comprehensive package of materials to supplement the K-8 and high school curricula. The lessons are interdisciplinary and have wide application. For instance, Casey Harris, an educator in Hastings, Michigan, uses PLT materials to develop early child ecology programs at Binder Park Zoo.
The emphasis, according to Tess Erb, PLT project coordinator, “is on learning by doing, instead of having things thrown at the kids lecture-style. If the topic is the water cycle, the learning tools are clouds and puddles.” In one lesson, kids build an “environmental exchange box,” gathering some of the natural things around them and sending them to other schools. “We’re not just training teachers,” says Erb. “We’re reaching kids, and the kids are learning and having fun.”
CONTACT
Project Learning Tree
1111 19th Street NW, Suite 780
Washington, DC 20036
Tel: (202) 463-2457
URL: http://www.plt.org
Project WILD
The project, which has trained more than 600,000 educators since 1983, has a special emphasis on reaching urban areas, where the environment can be an abstract concept. In a crime-ridden neighborhood in Denver, for example, students at Hallet Elementary School are developing a “sensory garden,” featuring a geological and wildlife study area. In Indianapolis, seventh graders at Northview Middle School are equipping community parks with bat houses. The goal, says Project WILD, is to teach youth how to think—not what to think—about the environment. “We work with the wildlife kids have around them, starting with birds and squirrels,” says Donna Asbury, Project WILD’s director. “Wildlife is a natural connector for children.”
CONTACT
Project WILD
707 Conservation Lane, Suite 305
Gaithersburg, MD 20878
Tel: (301) 527-8900
URL: http://www.projectwild.org
North American Association for Environmental Education
Only a third of this professional association’s 15,000 members are formal classroom teachers. The others are “non-traditional” educators who work for zoos, nature centers, park services and industry. “The public may not think of some of these people as educators, but that’s what they are,” says Joan Haley, deputy director of outreach programs. “We try to work across the different disciplines in a non-advocacy way, encouraging professors to talk to zoo people and government folks, with the aim of building community support for solid environmental education.”
CONTACT
North American Association for Environmental Education
1825 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20009
Tel: (202) 884-8912
URL: http://www.naaee.org