CareerOpportunitieswithEnvironmentalEducationCenters.docVIP

Career Opportunities with Environmental Education Centers Job-seekers looking for employment in the environmental education centers face a bewildering array of job titles, potential employers, and prior experience and education requirements. Persistence and flexibility, however, may let applicants land some of the more interesting and rewarding environmental jobs out there. Sprinkled throughout the nation are thousands of environmental centers, some large facilities with full-time staffs and others loose networks of activists. Many school districts bolster their curricula with regular school trips to these centers. As a consequence, there is a real need for well-informed practitioners of environmental education throughout the nation. Some regions of the country, such as Washington State, have a long history of state-supported environmental education, but now every region of the country has created state commissions and programs designed to encourage environmental education. On the federal level, The National Environmental Education Act of 1990 established an ongoing grants program promoting environmental education. Applicants should also be flexible when searching job postings, as a variety of terms can be used to refer to similar environmental education jobs. For example, the fields of “outdoor education” and “experiential education” overlap in many places with environmental education. Outdoor education, best exemplified by wilderness programs like National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), put students in wilderness settings to build confidence and learn about the natural world. The new field of experiential education, broadly defined, includes any educational activity in which students leave the classroom and perform a real-world activity in order to learn. For example, students might travel to an environmental education center, hike into a field, and then engage in a simulation of predator/prey relationships led by an instructor; this activity could be var