Passport to Texas

Bringing nature to the classroom. Image: texaschildreninnature.org

Back to School Week: Outreach & Education Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is Passport to Texas Back to School Week

You might wonder why Texas Parks and Wildlife trains teachers to provide outdoor education and conservation curricula, when many groups statewide already address those areas.

So, typically, if you’re working with school groups, you’ll have a more diverse audience, and a more diverse representation of the population than you would in a self-selected or volunteer group.

Johnnie Smith is director of Outreach and Education for Texas Parks and Wildlife, which offers wide ranging programs.

Under Outreach & Education, we have angler education, boater education, hunter education—all of our outreach and recruitment efforts [like the Texas State Fair]—and then lastly we have a section that’s called conservation Education. Those are the folks that work directly with school-aged children and teachers.

Conservation programs include Project Wild, TCiN and community water curricula. Teachers receive training and resource materials so they can expose students to natural resources, wildlife and habitat.

Because, what we find is, that until somebody establishes an affinity for nature, they’re not likely to ever develop a conservation-minded approach, or stewardship approach. And so, we hope that that investment in the kids will yield us folks that are stewardship and conservation-minded in the future.

Bring the Texas outdoors to your classroom; learn how when you click the Education tab on the Texas Parks and Wildlife website.

Our show receives support from RAM Trucks: Built to Serve.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife, I’m Cecilia Nasti.