Ecology Project International–Mexico implements a holistic approach that cultivates students’ ability to play an active role in creating sustainable communities. We strengthen students’ capacity for critical thinking through mentorship, environmental education experiences, and project development so they can communicate, develop, and collaborate on projects that address their concerns.

No money? No time? No problem! Join a former AmeriCorps VISTA as she discusses developing a native pollinator and crop garden on a budget. This presentation will profile the garden at Sequoyah HS, a Title I vocational school in Tennessee.

Come to learn about resources related to case study pedagogy. This session will showcase two environmental cases (sea turtle conservation and carbon emissions) used in college-level courses to engage students in learning and practicing analytical skills. Lots of ready-to-use case study collections will be shared!

Join a roundtable discussion about the use of case studies to engage students in practicing data analysis skills. The panelists are participants of the QUBES-SESYNC faculty mentoring network and will guide a lively discussion session about best practices and challenges of the case study approach in teaching college-level environmental courses.

Is it worth surveying EE researchers across nations? While introducing the results of our pilot test, a group of Japanese, Taiwanese, and Korean researchers is going to discuss the potential of such an international study toward not only increasing research capacities but also promoting communication with practitioners.

In the past several decades, China campus environmental clubs have sprung up like mushrooms across campuses nationwide. They are recognized as environmental educators on campus. Further, through learning and acting together, club members are immersed in the “environmental education program” of their own club. However, this “environmental education program” is self-taught and totally experiential. Club leaders are challenged as the club grows and the expectations increase, especially in their responsibility for environmental education. Therefore, we, three university students, initiated the Capacity Building Network (CaBuN!) for China Campus Environmental Clubs in April 2018. Our goals are to enhance leadership in China campus environmental clubs, to build awareness of environmental education as a field of study and practice among China campus environmental clubs, and to promote scholarship and entrepreneurship based on China campus environmental clubs.

We will share our approach and findings on opportunities and challenges associated with directly assessing volunteers’ skills in the context of citizen science. We will focus on embedded assessments and will discuss your experience, perspective and questions with this method to understand participants’ skills and even behavioral change.

Encouraging conservation action may require EE providers repeating similar messages. We present our process to identify ideal actions with a comparison of views from scientists, educators, and citizens and ask if educators should focus on the most important, the most likely to achieve results, or the most popular actions.

Bring your lunch and join other feminist environmental education researchers for an informal chat on topics of interest to you. These might include navigating the academy as a woman, addressing gender and other biases in research or teaching, or furthering feminist EE research or practice. We particularly welcome graduate students and new scholars.

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.