Educator Spotlight: Aaron Sebens

Aaron Sebens, a teacher at Central Park School for Children in Durham just completed his N.C. Environmental Education Certification.

Sebens is a librarian and project specialist and also helps teacher begin environmental education projects.  His favorite part about the program was learning outside and about so many topics from landfills to raptors, watersheds to solar power.

For his community partnership project, Aaron’s fourth grade class launched a crowd-funding campaign to add solar electricity to their classroom. “It went viral and we ended up raising enough money to take our classroom completely off the grid. The U.S. Department of Energy made a video about the project  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lGjOtIQ1YQ and President Obama tweeted about it,” said Sebens.

Fourth-grade teacher Aaron Sebens and some of his students - (from left) Ella Brown, Peter Mullen, Natalie Russell, Cassie Wells, and Ellen Broghausen, pose with the class' solar panels on the roof of the building at Central Park School. The class raised money and did the construction to convert their classroom to solar energy as a school project.

Sebens said that the project awareness and skills that citizens will need to solve the problems our society will face. “We are, for the most part, ignorant consumers of electricity. Students monitored the electricity we used in the classroom, at their house, and found out they can make do with a lot less. They learned the skills of organizing resources and developing a plan to make a big idea into a reality. This project is ongoing and last year we added a wind turbine to provide more and a different source of clean energy.

Sebens immersed his students in the process of planning the system, raising the funds, and working with community partners to make the project work. “Students need to become active participants in their understanding and consumption of electricity if we are going to have the innovators we will need to solve the problems that will arise in the next century.”

When asked if the certification program changed his approach to teaching Sebens said that he thinks about formal and informal educational experiences in different ways and considers ways to remove obstacles to environmental education not just for students but for teachers as well. 

The N.C. Environmental Education Certification Program is offered by the Department of Environmental Quality's Office of Environmental Education and Public Affairs. To learn more about the program, visit the office's website at www.eenorthcarolina.org