Chuck Roth
-Page 9

ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION; WHERE ARE WE GOING?

For more than four decades, Chuck Roth has been a leader and an innovator in environmental education in Massachusetts. Educated at Weslyan University, Univ. of Connecticut and Cornell University, he has taught at all levels from elementary school through graduate courses. For 27 years he directed the educational programs of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Through this and other positions he has been actively involved in the growth of EE from 1960 to 2000.

In a personal odyssey which takes him from Cornell University in the 1950s - home of Liberty Hyde Bailey and the Nature Study movement -- to his position as senior statesman and advisor for Environmental Education in New England in 2002, Chuck has watched it all unfold. An integral part of the movement, Chuck has a unique perspective on this field and can provide a participant's view of the history. As an active educator and grandparent, he speculates about the directions in which EE is going.

In 1966 Chuck founded what is now the New England Environmental Education Alliance. He was a founder of the Massachusetts Environmental Education Society and a founder and two-term president of the National Alliance for Environmental Education. In 1972 he chaired a group established to develop a comprehensive, statewide environmental education plan and fought for many years the see the plan implemented. In the mid-1980s he joined with other professional colleagues in establishing an informal networking group which has become SAGEE (the Secretary's Advisory Group on Environmental Education.) For nearly a decade Chuck served as co-chairman and chairman of this group supervising production of "Benchmarks on the Road to Environmental Literacy." Over the years he has interacted with, and mentored, many if not most, of the environmental education professionals in the New England region.

In 2001, Chuck published the Questioning Framework for Environmental Literacy. In 2002 Chuck, now retired, delights in the fact that Massachusetts has finally adopted - and is implementing -- a statewide structure for delivery of Environmental Education to the students of the Commonwealth (footnote Alan's workshop). Despite this, Chuck challenges all of us to examine where we, and the EE profession, are going.

Join us as Chuck takes us on an EE Journey: Where are we? How did we get here? and Where are we going?

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