Partnerships Gone Wild: Preparing Teachers of Young Children to Teach About the Natural World‪.‬

As our environmental landscapes continue to shift, schools face the rising challenge of providing engaging environmental education programs for their students. These programs must be multi-faceted and foster environmental awareness and understanding while facilitating action. As children are spending increasingly less time outdoors interacting with nature and more time interacting with media to learn about nature, and as urban structures continue to consume the natural areas, the need to re-examine how we train educators to address environmental education increases (Hudson, 2001). This article describes how one large, urban university teacher preparation program addressed the issue of preparing teachers of young children to be effective environmental educators through an integrated partnership called Strengthening Awareness and Valuing the Environment (SAVE). This partnership involves the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) College of Education and Human Development, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and San Antonio Parks and Recreation Department. The first goal of SAVE is to increase preservice teachers' knowledge of, and interaction with, the city's abundant and available natural areas. The second goal is to influence preservice teachers' perceptions of the environment by using systematic, hands-on professional development experiences in environmental education. SAVE not only increases preservice teachers' knowledge about the existence of the natural areas, it also helps teachers discover how environmental education and available local natural areas can become important components in their teaching for effective student learning about the natural world. Preservice teachers should understand that "experiences outside the classroom are an important instructional strategy for engaging young children in direct discovery of the world around them" (North American Association for Environmental Education, 2004b, p. 3), and to bring this knowledge into their teaching practice in the future.