Introduction

Welcome! Excellence in Environmental Education - Guidelines for Learning (K-12) (NAAEE, 1999) offers a vision of environmental education and promotes progress toward sustaining a healthy environment and quality of life. The Guidelines provide students, parents, educators, home schoolers, administrators, policy makers, and the public a set of common, voluntary guidelines for environmental education. The Guidelines support state and local environmental education efforts by:

• Setting expectations for performance and achievement in fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades;
• Suggesting a framework for effective and comprehensive environmental education programs;
• Demonstrating how environmental education can be used to meet standards set by the traditional disciplines and to give learners opportunities to synthesize knowledge and experience across disciplines;
• Defining the aims of environmental education.

• An overview for becoming familiar with the four strands and how they become more sophisticated at higher grade levels;
• A set of self assessment checklists for analyzing the degree to which your various curricula and educational programs may meet the Guidelines.

Executive Summary

The Executive Summary can be used as an easy reference to Excellence in Environmental Education—Guidelines for Learning (K-12) (NAAEE 1999). As in the full document, the Executive Summary is organized into four strands, each of which is further delineated by a set of guidelines that describe a level of skill or knowledge appropriate for each of three grade levels – fourth, eighth, and twelfth. In the Executive Summary, guidelines for a particular strand are arranged on two page layouts, so that the user can quickly understand the flow of guidelines at a grade level or compare how guidelines progress across the grade levels. It should be remembered that the Executive Summary is designed to provide only an overview. For a more in-depth view of the strands and their guidelines, it will be necessary to refer to Excellence in Environmental Education—Guidelines for Learning (K-12).

Overview