The Colorado Environmental Education Master Plan (CEEMP) outlines important goals for the future integration of environmental education for all people in the state. The plan looks to the future and discusses seven goals to help Colorado create a united vision for the future of environmental education. The seven goals presented in the plan are collaboration, professional development, promotion, formal education, diversity, quality and relevance, and systemic EE. In this essay, I will briefly discuss all seven goals. Then in more detail, I will examine how I will address the diversity and systemic EE goals.
The first goal outlined in the plan is collaboration. The plan urges current EE activists and educators to consider how the EE community can stay better connected to support each other in our common goals. This can be done through creating and strengthening collaboration with new and existing partnerships between individuals and organizations. The plan highlights collaboration with underutilized EE stakeholders such as students and pre-service environmental educators as well as invested individuals from the government, media, and private businesses. The collaboration goal outlines specific strategies to improve these different relationships.
Goal two discusses the continuation and implementation of various professional development strategies. One of these strategies is to focus on increasing new and distributing existing research in environmental education, specifically related to EE evaluations. Another strategy is to assess existing tools and need for a certification process for environmental education. Finally, the plan identifies the need for increased comprehension and use of program evaluation techniques.
The next goal outlined in the master plan, promotion, focuses on the importance of communicating the merits of environmental education. The goal suggests this can be accomplished by identifying a consistent and persuasive explanation of environmental education. Similarly, the plan implores that EE providers develop common language and train others to communicate consistently and effectively around environmental education. The plan advocated for increasing the use of media to reach the public and tailoring communications toward people in a position to act. A final component of this goal identifies the need to improve communications around accountability and evaluation of EE programs.
The master plan identifies explicit integration of EE into formal education as the fourth goal. The plan identifies the importance of advertising improvements to student learning EE can provide as a tool to attract formal educators and administrators to the EE community. The plan suggests further research of the potential to integrate EE elements into teacher training programs as well as graduation requirements in higher education institutions.
Goal five is diversity, I will discuss this in detail below. The final goal that I will discuss here implores the EE community to increase the quality and relevance of environmental education. EE providers should increase relevance by incorporating individual actions, urgent and current events, and linking issues to local experiences. It is also important to support EE learning experiences that include learners of all ages and can affect a persons’ physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional self.
In my time as a TREE student, I will work towards the increasing diversity in the EE community. The Master Plan introduces a variety of suggestions for EE providers to increase access to environmental education. Some of the ideas are not yet attainable for me to address in full. At the TREE Semester, we are relatively isolated and interact with a limited number of people. I am also limited by the ways that I identify and the communities I come from. There are numerous ways that I can reach beyond the limitations of the program and my own identity. Historically, environmentalism has been reserved for a community largely made up of wealthy, white citizens. It must be a priority of the EE community to remove barriers preventing individuals from experiencing the learning benefits of the EE community. The master plan itself identifies four sub-goals within the broader goal of diversity.
Goal 5-A implores EE providers to actively discover ways to broaden the audience of environmental education. To do this, one must identify which learners are currently included and excluded from environmental education. During this semester, I will create EE curriculum for both fifth graders living in Woodland Park and high schoolers living in Colorado Springs who may have limited access to EE. To reach beyond these students, I plan on reaching out to educators I have previously worked with from an area largely removed from the EE community. Last year I lived and worked as an AmeriCorps volunteer in a rural community in southern Colorado. Despite their proximity to beautiful outdoor recreation and environmental learning opportunities, I found EE generally lacking in the area. I plan on modifying and sharing EE lessons that could be introduced as short activities in that afterschool program.
Goal 5-B addresses diversity of EE providers. I feel as though my identity and past communities I have been a part of limit my ability to address this issue. My identity in many ways aligns with the typical demographics of the stereotypical EE provider. Still, I have the opportunity to teach students about environmental education and about who can become an environmental educator. One way I can do this is by controlling how I address my students and how I discuss the values or skills needed to be an environmentalist or environmental educator. One way to do this is by focusing on more accessible forms of environmentalism. In my curriculum, a focus on environmentalism that is affordable, close to home, and relevant to the lives and interests of my students will hopefully broaden their assumptions about who can become an EE provider. The diversity goal has two more sub-goals outlined in the master plan. Goal 5-C addresses the need for more diverse delivery methods of EE. Goal 5-D advocates to increase the direct accessibility of EE information for users.
The next goal, I plan to work towards during my time at the TREE Semester is systemic EE. The final goal of the master plan outlines a move to reduce fragmentation and promote a systemic approach to environmental education. This goal identifies the value in focusing on specific issues as well as grasping environmental issues as a whole system. The EE community should promote cooperation between EE programs and conversations focusing on the creation of a systemic approach for environmental education. The plan discusses two explicit actions that can help achieve this goal. The first suggestion is to create a team focused on researching and guiding the best practices of systemic EE. The next suggestion is to develop a baseline environmental literacy assessment. I will address the need for an environmental assessment.
A few of the master plan goals (professional development, promotion, and systemic EE) discuss the need for improvements in program and individual evaluations in the EE community. To address common educational objectives, there needs to be an assessment of skills related to these EE objectives. The master plan identifies the need for an assessment to address:
questioning and analysis skills
knowledge of environmental processes and systems
skills for understanding and addressing environmental issues
personal/civic responsibility
At the TREE Semester this need has been heard and individuals have begun working towards the development of a Lectical Environmental Stewardship Assessment (LESA). The assessment has been written and been put to initial use, mostly with college students and fifth graders. I hope to work alongside its creators by researching metrics that could be used to score the assessment to learn more about how environmental stewardship skills, especially those related to systems thinking, develop over the life course. The first step in this process will be a coding project that aims to identify specific skills relevant to environmental stewardship. I will code past LESA assessments and attempt to identify emergent themes and skills so that we can better create curriculum across a diverse range of developmental levels.
EE programs in Colorado would benefit from the creation and adoption of a unified vision and direction for environmentalism. The master plan outlines how creating connections, improving professional development and evaluation techniques, implementing effective communication, including EE in general education, increasing relevance, focusing on diversity, and promoting a systemic view of EE are key steps for EE providers to design the future of EE in Colorado.