The Arizona Association for Environmental Education is charged with the mission of promoting environmental literacy throughout Arizona. 'Environmental Literacy' describes one's abilitity to make informed decisions about the environment and take responsible, effective actions. This should be the goal of all environmental education in our state.
The Arizona Framework for Environmental Concepts and Themes serves to further define environmental literacy for our state's educators, and can be used to guide learning in both K-12 classrooms and non-formal settings.
Arizona's Environmental Literacy Plan for K-12 schools
AAEE recognizes the tremendous support amongst Arizona citizens for statewide coordination of formal environmental education. Thus, we’ve formalized a plan to provide schools across Arizona access to quality EE resources and support. We expect to demonstrate over the next few years that integration of EE in our formal classrooms is feasible, and beneficial to Arizona’s future citizens. For more background information about this plan, read our Summary Description of Arizona’s Statewide Efforts Toward Environmental Literacy.
Components of the developing plan include mechanisms for information sharing amongst educators statewide, such as our Day in the Sun for EE Schools and our EE Resource Database, coming fall of 2010. We also will be creating at least 5 partner teams for the 2010/2011 academic year through our Partnerships for EE . We hope these partner teams will serve as models for partnering schools with local non-formal environmental educators in all regions of the state, providing support for EE integration across all K-12 curricula.
The Arizona Framework for Environmental Concepts and Themes will help to correlate EE concepts with the Arizona State Academic Standards. The Arizona Department of Education plans to promote these linkages. Student assessment of environmental literacy can serve to provide us data about student growth over time, and links to academic achievement.
We continue to gather support for these efforts, and our Arizona ELP Stakeholders list is growing! If you’d like to be added to our list, please submit your name, organization name, and contact email to lherrmann@cox.net
