Host Your Own eeOpenSpace!

HOST YOUR OWN EE OPEN SPACE! 5/29/2020

KAEE is excited to announce a new summer eeOpenSpace program—one that YOU can make your own! The program allows our members and wider audience to host their own virtual Open Space or round table conversation around a topic of their choosing. What sparks your interest most these days? What would you like to chat about with others in our community? What ways would you like to connect during this unprecedented time? If you're looking for a couple of ideas, we’re happy to offer a few: ​

• Social: coffee hour, trivia, group outdoor activity (ex: group evening moth-watching, live outdoor scavenger hunt), happy hours, bingo

• Topic-specific: fundraising/sustaining operations, citizen/community science, equity and inclusion (including how to engage those without internet access!), summer camp alternatives, volunteers, social media/online communications, ideas for families to engage in local nature, educator self-care

We anticipate that these calls are likely to truly be engaging conversations, not formal presentations. If you’d like to lead a session, please do! We’ll be here to help you set up the time, online space, and more. ​Ready to get started? Email katherine@kaee.org with your idea for a topic or activity, a few times and dates that would work best for you, and any other details you’d like to share. And, of course, let us know if you have any questions!

KAEE PARTNERS WITH ASSOCIATION OF FISH & WILDLIFE AGENCIES FOR UPDATED PROJECT WILD ACTIVITY GUIDE

With its mission to “provide wildlife-based conservation and environmental education that fosters responsible actions toward wildlife and related natural resources,” Project WILD is an interdisciplinary EE program that helps participants develop an awareness, appreciation, and understanding of wildlife and habitat. Introduced in 1983, it has reached more than 100 million youth through more than 1.5 million educators and is one of the largest wildlife education programs in the world. Project WILD is administered by the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies (AFWA).

Project WILD curriculum is developed by scientists and those in natural resource management, reviewed and field-tested by educators, and aligned with national educational standards. And, to that last point, the Kentucky Association for Environmental Education has partnered with AFWA to document how more than sixty Project WILD activities containing science content (and all from the fourth edition of the Project WILD K-12 Curriculum & Activity Guide) correlate with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

KAEE Education Director Brittany Wray, longtime member and recently retired Eastern Kentucky University professor Melinda Wilder, and retired fourth-grade Madison County teacher Vivian Bowles have spent the past few months diligently reviewing the activities and developing a companion document detailing each activity’s correlation to the three dimensions of science: Disciplinary Core Ideas, Science & Engineering Practices, and Crosscutting Concepts. These correlations also provide educators with the Performance Expectation each activity supports.

In addition, the KAEE team is also creating each activity’s “guiding question,” or brief suggestion relating to a phenomenon (or phenomena) that helps educators connect phenomena at the beginning of their students’ learning experience, thereby increasing its relevance for students and helping guide students' inquiry and learning.

“In Kentucky, our facilitators train more educators in Project WILD than any other program we host,” Brittany says. “The Project WILD curriculum is an excellent tool for nonformal educators and formal educators alike. We are thrilled to partner with them in making Project WILD even more applicable to the formal educator with the development of these correlations. Teachers and students are held to high standards, and Project WILD can provide amazing experiences that lead students to a deeper understanding of the three-dimensional nature of science through wildlife.”

Learn more about Project WILD and how you can become trained in the curriculum here!

KAEE 2020 ANNUAL CONFERENCE GOING VIRTUAL

Join us—virtually!—this September! The 2020 Kentucky Association for Environmental Education Annual Conference will be held online this year, allowing for expanded creativity, recorded sessions (so you can attend ALL of them instead of being forced to choose between offerings), virtual happy hours, and a tremendous amount of EE information and fun!

We know that for many of our members and friends KAEE’s annual conference is like “a big family reunion” and an in-person event not to be missed, and the decision to transition to a virtual event for 2020 was bittersweet. Our board of directors and staff had numerous conversations about options for hosting the conference, and in the end, we all decided that moving to an online format for this year was the best way to keep everyone—the individual participants and our communities at large—healthy and safe.

And there are countless perks to the new format: recorded sessions that participants can watch anytime; opportunities to incorporate creative technology into sessions; reduced registration costs; virtual meetups for special interest groups; regional outdoor activities tied to conference themes; virtual happy hours; and more.

​Call for Proposals

The call for proposals is open, and given our plans to transition to an online format, we have extended the deadline to submit a proposal to June 7. To submit a proposal for a virtual session, complete the form here.

This year's theme is "Community Engagement: Building Sustainable Communities through the Power of Environmental Education.” Conference strands for 2020 include Education (EE Curriculum Programs, K-12 Education, Adult & Family Education, STEM, Green & Health Schools, etc.), Partnerships & Innovation (Community Partnerships, New & Innovative Projects, etc.), Civic Action (Community Service Projects, Service Learning, Green Schools Community Projects, etc.), and Capacity Building (Outreach, Fundraising, Communications, Messaging, Branding, Technology, etc.)