Environmental education is a lifelong learning process, focused on all ages and places—including schools, universities, community clubs, museums and nature centers, businesses, churches, mosques, and synagogues, parks, public forums, and everywhere learning takes place in our communities. We often talk about learning in environmental education taking place from cradle to grey.
Transcript:
My name is Kathayoon Khalil. I'm the principal evaluator at the Seattle Aquarium.
EE happens everywhere. So I obviously have focused on EE that happens in what we call informal or nonformal settings, so zoos or aquariums or museums or nature parks or outdoor schools or anything like that, but it can also extend to the dinner table. EE can happen on the internet. I feel like my first environmental [education] experiences were growing up on a farm outside of Portland and just going outside and exploring the 20 acres that we had full of mushrooms and plants and animals and streams. So EE is really something that can happen all over the world at any age or stage of your life.
Cradle to grave is a really, I think, wonderful way of looking at a person's life in terms of EE. As we're looking at our programming, we want to have things to offer to people who are planning their families for the first time, people in early childhood, and children who are experiencing the world for the first time. They're touching things and smelling things and this is really where they're going to start building who they are as a person, their environmental ethic. So we think a lot about families as multi-generational learners.
So you have a kid who comes to a program and they might have some different motivations or something different they're getting out of it versus their parents versus their grandparents versus their older siblings. So EE looks different for every person, but it can be a rich experience, no matter how old you are, or at what stage or background you're coming into it with.
Here at the Seattle Aquarium, we run 21 and over nights a lot for visitors because we know that may be a missed opportunity population for us where they're out of school. It's no longer where you go on your field trips or is no longer where you go with your friends, but before families and before they're bringing kids there. A lot of museums, a lot of zoos, a lot of aquariums are using these adult nights, 21 and over nights, to really drive participation from their millennial visitorship.
When a family or an individual comes to the zoo, it's because they want to. It's because they have an interest or at least they want to have fun and we embrace the entertainment. We embrace the fun because that's a huge part of what drives us and what makes us unique. It's people choosing to come and have environmental experiences, whether or not they see them that way as they're embarking on their day. And so with knowing those motivations, we can keep the fun and add the education and do that by building on what we know about how people learn and their motivations and just knowing that one of their motivations is to be at our institution, that's a really powerful thing.