Educator Spotlight - Chelsea (Cea) Flowers

Chelsea (Cea) Flowers recently completed her NC Environmental Education Certification. For the last four years, Cea has worked as a core field instructor/naturalist for Muddy Sneakers, a non-profit organization that partners with public schools to deliver high quality, hands-on outdoor science lessons that correspond to state standards. “It was an amazing experience to see students light up as they explored outdoors all while making connections to what they were learning in the classroom.”

In the summers, during the off-season, Cea wears a variety of hats. She taught an undergraduate class in public history, designed, and led a summer camp for a local non-profit community farm and worked on her own flora and fauna inspired pottery. She is currently seeking a new environmental education position, particularly in programming and advocacy.

When asked about her favorite part of earning her certification, Cea says she can’t pick just one, but the Project Learning Tree Southern Forest and Climate Change workshop facilitated by Renee Strnad, with NCSU Extension Forestry is at the top of her list. “It had been a while since I'd done a carbon sequestration exercise! That was a big favorite since it's just this immensely important geological action that I think every single person should have the opportunity to learn more about! It's kind of a big deal and fascinating.”

Cea says she enjoyed every one of the hands-on workshops she attended. “I really appreciated the ones that explored the intersections of class, race, and gender within our environmental history so, for example, the Equity and the Environment workshop stood out. I also really loved workshops that focused on pedagogy and methodology like Methods of Teaching Environmental Education. The organization I was working with had a very diverse group of students, with varying levels of comfort in the outdoors, so that workshop was very useful. One thing that held true from every single workshop, whether it was Aquatic Wild, bat monitoring, or a methodologies class was how much community connection can be built. You’re meeting so many people with all these different backgrounds and dreams. You’re learning from other attendees about what’s happening across the state-programs, resources, educational centers, and projects. By engaging with this community, I’ve gathered a lot of inspiration and made some wonderful personal and professional relationships. Also, being following by an elk at dusk while attending the Advanced Air Quality – Ground Level Ozone workshop in the mountains was a highlight!”

For her community partnership project, Cea installed two pollinator gardens in the coastal plains, one on the grounds of the Robeson County Public Library in Lumberton where she is originally from, to encourage more interaction with the outdoors, and the other at a rural elementary school in Chadbourn where the staff is enthusiastic about connecting students to nature. “I chose to do my project in this area because while beautiful and marked by unique topography and its rich diversity of plants, many of the communities here do not have access to resources available to other areas like the Triangle. I wanted to give these spaces the attention they deserve.”

Cea says the program helped her to gain confidence in her knowledge of natural resources and ecological systems. “My degrees were in humanities, with an MA in public history. And although I supplemented that with some elective college classes in environmental history and science, and then sought a variety of workshops and internships relating to ecology and ethnobotany, I don’t have a hard science degree…yet! But joining the certificate program kept me immersed and committed to continuing that education and gave me a lot more confidence passing on knowledge and curiosity to others. But as importantly, it gave me teaching strategies so that I could adapt my approaches to different learning styles and interests within the unique challenges that can come from outdoor education. I’ve also learned so many effective and fun activities that can be used spontaneously on a walk or over several days. I use quite a few with my friends and their kids and one day for my own.” 

Cea says the program also changed the way she looks at environmental issues. “I believe some of the workshops I took reaffirmed the importance of recognizing how systemic issues affect individual capacity for environmental interaction” so she tries to encourage the students she works with to be stewards of the environment.