Why a Workbook?
In 1996 Environmental Education Materials: Guidelines for Excellence was developed to provide recommendations for selecting, evaluating, and producing quality environmental education lesson plans, curricula, and other instructional materials. Through workshops, conferences, and presentations, National Project for Excellence in Environmental Education staff have trained environmental educators across the country in the use of these guidelines.

These workshops have been received well by both formal and nonformal educators. However, scheduling conflicts, trainer and audience availability, funding, and other logistical challenges limit the number of presentations we can give. This, in turn, limits the number of educators prepared to use these materials.

To overcome this obstacle, we have developed this Workbook to lead educators, step by step, through the process of using the Environmental Education Materials: Guidelines for Excellence. The Workbook is intended to extend the reach of the Guidelines to a much broader audience.

Why Environmental Education?
Environmental education (EE) is rooted in the belief that humans can live compatibly with nature and act equitably toward each other. Another fundamental belief is that people can make informed decisions that consider future generations. EE aims for a democratic society in which effective, environmentally literate citizens participate with creativity and responsibility.

EE often begins close to home, encouraging learners to understand and forge connections with their immediate surroundings. The awareness, knowledge, and skills needed for this localized learning provide a basis for moving out into larger systems, broader issues, and a more sophisticated comprehension of causes, connections, and consequences.

EE is good education. It is learner-centered and provides students with opportunities to construct their own understanding through hands-on, minds-on investigations. Engaged in direct experiences, learners are challenged to use higher order thinking skills. EE supports real-world contexts and issues from which concepts and skills can be learned. Quality EE programs are multidisciplinary and they facilitate teaching of science, civics, social studies, mathematics, geography, english language arts, economics, the arts, and history.

The Roots of EE
The Belgrade Charter was adopted by a United Nations conference in 1976 and provides a widely accepted goal statement for environmental education: "The goal of environmental education is to develop a world population that is aware of, and concerned about, the environment and its associated problems, and which has the knowledge, skills, attitudes, motivations, and commitment to work individually and collectively toward the solutions of current problems and the prevention of new ones."

A few years later, the world's first intergovernmental conference on environmental education adopted the Tbilisi Declaration. This declaration built on the Belgrade Charter and established three broad objectives for environmental education. These objectives provide the foundation for much of what has been done in the field since 1978:

• To foster clear awareness of and concern about economic, social, political, and ecological interdependence in urban and rural areas;
• To provide every person with opportunities to acquire the knowledge, values, attitudes, commitment, and skills needed to protect and improve the environment;
• To create new patterns of behavior of individuals, groups, and society as a whole towards the environment.

Workbook Goals and Objectives
This workbook is intended for use as a companion to the Environmental Education Materials: Guidelines for Excellence, hereafter referred to as the Materials Guidelines. The Materials Guidelines contain 28 recommendations, organized into six Key Characteristics, for creating effective environmental education materials. The Workbook demonstrates applications of these guidelines.

Structurally, the Workbook is divided into six sections which correspond to the six Key Characteristics found in the Materials Guidelines. Each section includes activities and examples that together clarify the 28 Materials Guidelines. Click HERE to view a side by side comparison of the Materials Guidleines and the Workbook Objectives.

This concludes the Introduction to Materials Guidelines: The Workbook.

Click HERE to continue on to "How To Use This Workbook"

Click HERE to return to the Table of Contents