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.”
