Program Overview

The Master of Environmental Education Program (MEEd) at the University of Minnesota Duluth traces back to 1991. While the program has evolved over the years, it has remained an integral part of UMD’s place-based identity as a campus on the shores of Lake Superior and a community that deeply values sustainability, environmental education, nature engagement, and outdoor recreation. Leveraging our region's rich history and culture of valuing natural resources, MEEd engages with the expertise of our regional environmental education community, including partners such as Sea Grant, Boulder Lake ELC, Hawk Ridge, Hartley Nature Center, Great Lakes Aquarium, Lake Superior Zoo, Lake Superior National Estuarine Research Reserve, ISD 709 School District, Duluth Nature Play Collaborative, state parks, Voyageurs Conservancy, Superior National Forest, and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. We embrace an experiential-based approach to engaging students in the environmental opportunities and challenges of our communities and contributing to a sustainable future through environmental education. We aim for excellence in environmental education practice, leadership, and scholarship.

Our Decision to Seek NAAEE Accreditation

The MEEd program has been accredited by NAAEE since 2017. Our decision to seek accreditation was part of the work we had underway at that time to revisit, revise, and clarify our learning outcomes and degree requirements. We were already using the Professional Development of Environmental Educators: Guidelines for Excellence to guide our curriculum revisions, and it just seemed like the right next step to work through the self-study process as a way for evaluating and reflecting upon our revisions to know if we were on track or if further revisions were needed. We found both the Guidelines and the self-study accreditation process served as guideposts, so that the changes we made were driven by something more than just what we thought the program should entail. Knowing the Guidelines had been so carefully crafted and widely vetted by practitioners and scholars in the field gave us confidence that we were on track as we made needed changes in our program. Looking back, we also had great confidence in Bora Simmon’s leadership she has provided to the field for decades. Her encouragement and willingness to explain the whys and hows of the accreditation process, as well as knowing that she was the ‘mastermind’ of this accreditation process, which was quite new at the time, was quite influential in our decision as well.

Benefits of Accreditation

One main benefit of NAAEE’s accreditation of our program has been that we can communicate internally and externally that our program is rigorous and of high quality; we think of it like a seal of approval. While initially our university wasn’t asking us to become accredited, over the years, and particularly in the face of budget cuts, accreditation has become more important internally. Practically speaking, on our campus, programs can use a professional accreditation process in place of an external review. That has been another benefit, since an external review is more internally-facing and communicates quality to the campus administrators, but less so to an external audience. Additionally, the NAAEE accreditation self-study document and the associated documentation of learning outcomes has aligned well with our campus assessment procedures, and we have found it quite feasible to collect learning outcome data that serves both the NAAEE accreditation process, as well our our campus assessment requirements.

An additional benefit has been being able to have conversations with students in the program about how course learning outcomes align with program outcomes, and how our program learning outcomes are grounded in the Guidelines, which we feel models program development and curriculum design concepts. Additionally, students come to our program from a breadth of fields beyond EE, and not all are familiar with NAAEE. Through these conversations, we have the opportunity to introduce students to NAAEE and one of its many facets. We also include our accreditation in our marketing and recruitment materials, as a way to communicate to prospective students that our program is of high quality.

Our Experience with the Accreditation Process

As we all know, assessment, evaluation, self-studies, and external reviews can be time-consuming and at times daunting. Having just completed an external review process for an undergraduate program, the NAAEE accreditation self-study process seemed more program-focused and better aligned with our ongoing assessment of learning outcomes than our university’s external review criteria and process. We found the NAAEE accreditation self-study to be not only feasible, but also meaningful. For example, while working on the self-study it became apparent that we had a few learning outcomes that mapped to courses that were electives, which prompted a decision to revise which programs were considered electives v. requirements. And while the process of accreditation is high stakes, we appreciated that questions could be asked and guidance offered by the accreditation leadership team. We also appreciated that we had the opportunity to respond to questions from the reviewers of our self-study, before they finalized their recommendations and decision.

Final Thoughts

When we first became accredited by NAAEE, we were among just a few other programs that had this accreditation. As the years have gone by and the list of NAAEE-accredited higher education programs grew, it was initially tempting to think that our competition was growing and that we were no longer standing out in the way we earlier were. Yet over time, we have recognized that having many NAAEE-accredited higher education programs is a really good thing, as it means the strength, quality, and influence of our field is growing! Accreditation encourages excellence and in-depth, continual assessment and improvement. We now see maintaining our accreditation as not only good for our program, but good for the field of environmental education as a whole! As such we plan to maintain our accreditation, as we see this as a way of contributing to the quality of our profession.