Understanding data is a key component of environmental literacy, yet many students and teachers still feel uncomfortable working with data. In 2012, the Asombro Institute for Science Education and the Jornada Basin LTER in Las Cruces, New Mexico founded Desert Data Jam as a data-literacy and communication competition for high-school students. The competition introduces students to many NGSS data literacy practices, including developing models, analyzing and interpreting data, and obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information. The Data Jam model engages students with local or regionally collected scientific or community specific datasets and teaches students how to analyze, and communicate the findings of that data in a creative, meaningful way to them(i.e. painting, song, or dance).

From Lonesome George to rangers in Africa, storytelling is commonly used to connect audiences of all ages to conservation. This session will focus on how to launch a successful conservation writing contest that allows people to use their voices to speak up for voiceless species around the world.

Teens worldwide are using their creative voices to inspire awareness and action for our blue planet. Hear how Bow Seat’s Ocean Awareness Contest provides a space for youth—10,000 and counting—to artistically explore environmental issues, and to amplify their voices to advance dialogue and participation in ocean conservation.

Practicing pre-K–8 teachers visited Springs Eternal: Water, Hope, Change, an art exhibit as part of a comprehensive professional development project focused on integrating EE across the curriculum. We will share the ways in which the teachers reacted and planned to shift their teaching as a result of this visit.

Calling all Urban Engineers: You are the director of this Anthropo(s)cene! Our citizens need your help designing their future. Your objective is to take ancient wisdom and combine it with cutting-edge ideas to create resilient and adaptable cities! Using tools like systems thinking, causal maps, story chips and hands-on models, your team will define the big ideas, design for a specific geography & climate, test the resiliency of your design and ultimately tell your city story. Our future depends on how we decide to shape it!

This professional development workshop nurtures liberating creativities, introducing environmental educational (EE) researchers to arts-based educational research. Together we explore justice and empathy, surface and value diversity through multiple ways of knowing, and engage with arts-informed ways of researching. Affirmations, motivations, theoretical lenses, approaches, research examples, and practices are shared to inspire hands-on, interactive infusions and collaborative inquiry. Motivations for this work involve building inclusion and multiple ways of knowing, developing a critical lens, leveraging creativity to build capacity for handling complexity (from the Tbilisi Declaration), and creating brave spaces for research and program design. Theories explored include environmental justice, feminist materialism, Gaian lens, and intersectionality, as well as the approaches of just sustainability arts, socially conscious/engaged art, STEAM, and art as a spiritual practice.

Director Sylvie Rokab will share clips of the film Love Thy Nature - narrated by Liam Neeson - which takes viewers on a cinematic journey through the beauty of our relationship with nature. She will discuss how her team and partners are igniting a nature-connecting movement in schools and beyond.

This workshop brings liberating creativities to life, introducing EE practitioners and researchers to arts-based educational research and program design. Together we explore justice and empathy, surface and value diversity through multiple ways of knowing, and engage with arts-informed ways of researching. We introduce arts-based approaches by sharing affirmations, theories, resources, approaches, examples, and practices to support your discovery. The four motivations for this work involve building inclusion and multiple ways of knowing, developing a critical lens, leveraging creativity to build capacity for handling complexity (from the Tbilisi Declaration), and creating brave spaces for research and program design. Theories explored include environmental justice, feminist materialism, Gaian lens, and intersectionality and brave spaces, as well as the approaches of just sustainability arts, socially conscious/engaged art, STEAM, and art as a spiritual practice.