Green Teacher Webinar on Engaging Diverse Audiences

Strategies for Successfully Engaging Culturally Diverse Audiences

Monday, January 30, 2012, 7:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
Presenter:  Gus Medina

Are you finding it difficult to engage increasingly diverse audiences in your community? Have you tried to attract visitors from diverse cultural backgrounds to your environmental education programs and met with limited success? This webinar will examine how similar challenges led three organizations to seek more effective strategies for working with culturally diverse audiences. Gus Medina will share the experiences of these organizations and strategies that can help program managers and educators make their programs more inclusive. There will be about 25 minutes for participants to ask questions and share strategies based on their experience.

Suitability:  All formal and non-formal youth educators

Gus Medina manages EECapacity, a national project intended to help anyone who wants to increase their effectiveness as an environmental educator. The project is addressing the question, What does environmental education look like in a society that is increasingly urban and culturally diverse? Cornell University is the managing partner and U.S. EPA funds the EECapacity Project. Between 1995 and 2010 Dr. Medina served as Project Manager for the Environmental Education and Training Partnership (EETAP), a consortium of organizations that increased the capacity of education professionals to deliver high quality environmental education. He was also responsible for several EETAP activities that produced What’s Fair Got To Do With It: Diversity Cases from Environmental Educators, a day-long workshop that examined the intersection of environmental education and cultural diversity, and an online course on how make environmental education more relevant for culturally diverse audiences. Prior to EETAP, Dr. Medina served as a Senior Program Officer with World Wildlife Fund-US. Dr. Medina holds PhD in Natural Resources Management from the University of Michigan with a specialization in environmental education.

Register Here

http://eelinked.naaee.net/n/eelinked/posts/Green-Teacher-Webinar-on-Engaging-Diverse-Audiences

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School Flag Program

Did you know air pollution is a trigger for asthma?  Did you know children, including teenagers, are especially sensitive to the harmful effects of air pollution?  What is your plan of action when the air quality is poor?  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a program to help you.  You are invited to participate in the School Flag Program, an easy and inexpensive way to help your school and surrounding community know the air quality conditions each day.

Schools in the Flag Program raise a brightly colored flag each day that corresponds to the air quality forecast. Based on the color of the flag, teachers and coaches can modify outdoor activities when the air quality is unhealthy.

You can find more information about the program at www.airnow.gov/schoolflag.   Four easy steps (explained in the Coordinator’s Handbook) will get your flag program started:

   1. Purchase set of flags (cost is generally less than $100).

   2. Educate and inform the school and community at the start of the program (sample article included).

   3. Subscribe to a free email service (www.enviroflash.info) to obtain the daily air quality forecast and fly the corresponding flag.

   4.   Know what actions to take when the air quality is unhealthy (recommendations/actions chart included).

EPA highlights participating schools on the School Flag Program website and recognizes them with an official membership certificate.

For more information or help getting the program started at your school, please contact  rogers.donna@epa.gov.  If your school already has a school flag program, register at http://www.airnow.gov/index.cfm?action=airnow.schoolflagprogram and they will highlight  your school on the EPA website and send you a membership certificate.

Fund For Wild Nature

The Fund for Wild Nature provides small grants to small groups who get things done. Our Board of Directors is comprised of lifelong environmental activists who know which steps are needed to protect and restore our planet, and which strategies and tactics will work. We will direct your donation to where it is most needed. Join us as an investor in wild nature!

Kentucky Environmental Literacy Plan approved by Kentucky Board of Education

Press Release from the Education Cabinet

Kentucky Environmental Literacy Plan approved by Kentucky Board of Education

FRANKFORT, Ky. (Dec. 7, 2011) – The Kentucky Board of Education today approved the implementation of the Kentucky Environmental Literacy Plan (KELP) by the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE). The plan’s objective is to ensure that Kentucky students are educated about the environment when they graduate from high school.

The plan was developed by the KELP Task Force, which includes a diverse group of educators and other key stakeholders appointed by Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday. Environmental literacy is defined by the KELP Task Force as “the ability to recognize the components of healthy natural and man-made systems and the actions necessary to maintain, restore or improve them.”

Kentucky First Lady Jane Beshear applauded the approval of plan. “The Kentucky Environmental Literacy Plan uniquely promotes energy efficiency, sustainability and environmental preservation through valuable classroom learning,” said Mrs. Beshear. “Providing students with a strong foundation in environmental knowledge and practices today will benefit the overall environmental quality of the Commonwealth for future generations.”

Kentucky Education and Workforce Development Cabinet Secretary Joseph U. Meyer, said, “Innovative approaches are essential to helping Kentucky meet our goals of workforce development and college preparedness. Implementing this plan will help our students develop important collaboration, teamwork and problem-solving skills in the context of real world concerns that we face in Kentucky.”

Felicia Smith, KELP Task Force co-chair and associate commissioner for KDE, said that the plan will help students reach proficiency in all subject areas, including science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). “The Kentucky Environmental Literacy Plan is ambitious, but achievable as a means for reaching core competencies in STEM education and across the curriculum,” she said.

Research demonstrates that using the environment as a framework for study across academic disciplines, including math, language arts, science and social studies promotes academic achievement. In addition, this type of instruction positively impacts cognitive development, child health, workforce development and a healthy environment, said Kentucky Environmental Education Council (KEEC) Executive Director Elizabeth Schmitz. The agency is in the Education and Workforce Development Cabinet. 

 "Among other benefits, studies show that student motivation increases when environment-based education is incorporated into schools, as measured by increased attendance, decreased tardiness and fewer discipline referrals,” said Schmitz. “This occurs at the same time that standardized test scores improve, especially in language arts. The marked improvement in language arts shows the truly interdisciplinary nature of environmental education.” 

 Dr. Melinda Wilder, KELP Task Force co-chair and director of Natural Areas at Eastern Kentucky University, said, “Taking our students outside, for even 15 minutes, to write an essay about something that they can see and touch – for example, a tree – gives students experiences that help them include vivid, real life details in their descriptions. That same tree can be used to learn math – calculating the tree height, circumference, and board feet, for example. It can also be used to teach about scientific concepts, social studies and history.”

 The KELP Task Force also was co-chaired by Billy Bennett, director of the Center for Environmental Education at EKU.

 Development of KELP was funded by the Kentucky Environmental Education Council using America Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) money. The next phase of the KELP is to develop an Implementation Plan as directed by the Board of Education. This effort will be led by the KELP co-chairs and an Implementation Advisory Team named by Commissioner Holliday. The Implementation Plan will be completed in spring of 2012.

 The Kentucky Environmental Literacy Plan can be viewed on the KEEC website at http://www.keec.ky.gov.

Contacts:

Felicia Cumings Smith 

(502) 564-9850

Dr. Melinda Wilder

(859) 622-1476

Billy Bennett
(859) 622-2902

For updates and to show your support of this plan, join the Kentucky Environmental Literacy Alliance (KELA), a coalition of businesses, agencies, schools, citizens, and non-profits voicing their support for an environmentally literate Commonwealth.  Join for FREE at thekela.com. 

Connecting Kids with Nature

Here are some ways you can support connecting kids with nature in the coming days:

Join the Healthy Kids Outdoors Act Group Sign-On Letter

Join the EPA Environmental Education Funding Sign-On Letter

Support Conservation Funding in Congress

Support the No Child Left Inside Act

Healthy Kids Outdoor Act Introduced in Congress

On November 3rd, Congressman Ron Kind (WI) and Senator Mark Udall (CO) introduced the Healthy Kids Outdoors Act in Congress!  This is a huge milestone for all of us working to reconnect children, youth and families with nature.

You can read more here and see Congressman Kind’s blog on the bill here.  The Outdoors Alliance for Kids press release is attached.

We believe that the policies proposed by the Healthy Kids Outdoors Act will advance our collective efforts to reconnect children, youth and families with the natural world, while improving our children's health, supporting economic growth and strengthening the future of conservation in America.  The legislation will achieve these goals by:

• Directing the President to develop an inter-agency federal strategy and action plan to connect children, youth and families with the natural world;
• Encouraging states to develop similar state-based strategies that incorporate public health, parks and recreation, transportation and other initiatives at the local level; and
• Supporting research documenting the health, conservation and other benefits of active time spent outdoors in the natural world.

The legislation encourages solutions that include connecting communities with green spaces, providing opportunities for outdoor recreation, engaging the health community to educate parents and caregivers and much more.  We believe that the Healthy Kids Outdoors Act’s focus on health and recreation solutions will be an excellent complement to the No Child Left Inside (NCLI) Act's systemic approach of getting environmental education back into our nation's schools.

Save the Date: December 1, 2011, The Release of a Framework for Assessing Environmental Literacy

On December 1, join NAAEE for the roll-out of "A Framework for Assessing Environmental Literacy" at the National Press Club, Washington, DC, and live via the Internet.

This new framework for assessing environmental literacy was developed with experts from the fields of environmental education, social studies education, and science education, plus related policy and social science fields. The development team will be joined by leaders from large-scale national and international assessments to discuss how to define and assess environmental literacy. The NAAEE spearheaded this project with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), and is partnering with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation (NMSF) to release the framework.

Mark your calendars for Thursday, December 1, 2011, 1:00 - 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time

To register for this important event, visit:  www.naaee.net/framework