Educator Spotlight: Amanda Strickland

Amanda Strickland, conservation education specialist for Cleveland County Soil and Water Conservation District recently completed her NC Environmental Education Certification.

Amanda is a nonformal educator who works with schools and community-based groups and organizations. “I work with people who are interested in learning about our natural resources and how to protect them. I work with all ages and love the opportunity to get students outside to learn about their environment.”

Amanda says her favorite part of earning her certification was attending programs and meeting people working in the environmental education field. She says the experience that stood out for her was her community partnership project. “My community partnership project is an ongoing project that has been a learning curve for me. A lot of effort has gone into this project, and I hope to continue it into the future.

For her project, Amanda worked with teachers, parents and Rutherford County 4-H agent Cynthia Robbins to form a new 4-H club, the Wilderness Habitat Education Program team at Thomas Jefferson Classical Academy, a public charter school in Rutherford County. “I was approached by several parents and a teacher about starting this club for elementary age children to help get them outside, make observations and learn more about nature and their environment and our impact as humans on our environment.”

Amanda taught the students how to identify different animal and plant species and what they need to thrive in their habitats. Another bonus is that this knowledge will help these students with their End-of-Grade (EOG) testing in science and in reading. We spent time with students and helped them gain practical knowledge that they can retain, and I think that is fantastic. This benefits the community and offers some like-minded students the opportunity to form strong bonds with one another and maybe become our future environmental leaders!”

Amanda says the certification program changed her approach to teaching. “It has taught me how to be better organized and how to better develop programs that meet the standards of environmental education. I like the structured way of developing and teaching programs that I learned as well as alternate ways to teach topics and variations of the same program that can be adapted to age and competency level of the audience.”

Amanda looks forward to preparing these students for the North Carolina Wildlife Habitat Education Program Competition in the spring. 

Educator Spotlight: Adrian Chamberlin

 

Adrian Chamberlin recently completed his NC Environmental Education Certification. Adrian is a nature instructor for two municipal parks in Wake County - Walnut Creek Wetland Center with the City of Raleigh and Hemlock Bluffs Nature Preserve with the Town of Cary.

As a nature instructor, Adrian is responsible for educational programming, but his duties sometimes also include being a private chef for animals, a Chinese privet slayer, and a box turtle wrangler. “Primarily, I teach middle school students through the Neighborhood Ecology Corps environmental literacy program, run by the City of Raleigh. When I'm not flipping rocks in streams or trying to identify plants, I enjoy reading, writing, and playing video games.”

Adrian says his favorite part of the program was “seeing the same people in workshops and getting to check in on their professional and certification journeys. It made the process fell collaborative and makes the field feel like a tight-knit network of collaborators and friends.”

When asked about the certification experience that stood out for him, Adrian says it was completing the Basics of Environmental Education through a college course. “It was the first time I was able to engage with a variety of different educators in an academic setting. Until then, my classmates had been almost exclusively my age (18-22), but there was a mix of undergraduate and graduate students, many of the latter having well-established careers. The unique feeling that we were simultaneously students and teachers garnered a lot of mutual respect, and it was deeply empowering as someone surrounded by people more accomplished than me.”

For his community partnership project, Adrian developed a series of nature programs, “Out in Nature,” designed to welcome people in the local LGBTQ community and to encourage them to explore their interest in nature in a safe space. “As an openly queer person in natural resources, there was not a lot of representation in my programs or mentorship, but I discovered a lot of myself through learning and the outdoors. I wanted to provide that for others. Our most successful session was the adult audience, which included chances to play indoors and out, and discuss how our identities connect us to nature.”

Adrian says the program changed his approach to teaching. “As my educational background is in Wildlife Biology, I had a lot of the knowledge needed but lacked ways to engage with it outside of just rattling off facts. Through the program, I received so many different resources for activities and methods of approaching different audiences. Now, I'm able to create much more structured, targeted programming, that balances the “edu-tainment” aspect of informal education.

The program also changed the way he thought about environmental issues. “In wildlife and conservation biology (among basically every other field), there's a lot of contention with best practices, level of importance to issues, and how to most effectively engage with stakeholders. With that comes a lot of strong opinions, and that tended to show through in my education, then how I approached teaching. I also did a lot of activism work throughout schooling, where hard stances need to be taken for change to happen. As someone with a lot of feelings and opinions, this is something that's been difficult to balance, when our job as educators is to create informed citizens about the issues without telling them what to think. In this process, however, I've also been able to open my mind to more nuance regarding environmental issues and how others view them as well.”