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Christine Rolka Director of Education |
WILD workshops for teachers
If you educate one teacher about wildlife conservation, you can reach 20 to 120 students per year, depending on the grade level they teach. Teach one non-formal educator, such as one who provides interpretive programs at nature centers, parks or museums, and you have the potential to reach as many as 5,000 students of all ages in a single year.
Add up these numbers over the span of a teaching career and talk about making a difference!
Reaching and teaching educators is the idea behind Project WILD and other national conservation education curriculums developed by the Council for Environmental Education. CEE programs are widely used in the education community, and most are delivered through state wildlife agencies through educator training workshops across the country.
More than a million educators have been trained through these workshops so far.
The NWTF has partnered with state wildlife agencies to host these workshops, and we’ve offered our support of them in several other states. We hope to do more in the future as interest in conservation education continues to climb.
Specifically, Project WILD Turkey workshops, like the one hosted by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game (featured this issue), not only provide classroom teachers and non-formal educators with necessary resources, but also have the added benefit of training them in wildlife and conservation principles. They show them how to deliver education activities that effectively teach these concepts while meeting state curriculum requirements.
Educators who attend the workshops engage in the learning activities that they will, in turn, present to their own students. These workshops, married with the NWTF’s existing education resources, provide an effective means of telling our story. We’re educating the educator about the role hunting plays in conservation, which is often the part that is left out. — Christine