One week, two confrence-esques

photo credit: jnthnhys

I’m in la belle provence for the next seven days attending & presenting at the 5th World Environmental Education Congress and participating in the 10th Seminar in Health and Environmental Education Research (you can read more about the outcomes of the 9th seminar). The congress is during the latter half of the seven days in Montreal and the seminar happens from Thursday May 7th to Sunday May 10th in beautiful Montebello, Quebec (seeing as I’ve never been there, I should reserve the beautiful adjective until after I return).

For the seminar on Environmental Education (EE) research, I’ll be spending time in conversation and thought wondering why, for example, the above photo “screams” environmental education. More than just that, and perhaps more importantly for EE research, if the experience depicted above screams EE, what other kinds of experiences might we be missing as researchers? The theme of the seminar is “Making a Difference” and looks to be focusing on just how we can make the kind of research that gets done under the name of EE make a difference–for the environment, obviously, but also for different populations, including humans as well as non-humans. Think of EE research done in the name of social and environmental justice in addition to strict education about the environment. At least, that’s going to be my M.O. going into it ;) I’ll be pushing the non-human agenda, as is my want; so much so that I’m pleased to be co-facilitating a session titled “How can we move beyond the human?” with Leesa Fawcett, Sue Hamel, Gail Kuhl, Jan Oakley and Traci Warkentin. The whole event should be great food for the brain.

While I wasn’t initially enthused about presenting my research at WEEC via a poster, I’ve come around and I’ve enjoyed the challenge of turning some of my preliminary findings into a poster. Part of the fun is getting to be a bit controversial with the poster–I can put forward some of the more challenging findings, and see how the masses react. It will be interesting to see what kind of reactions, if any, I get from my poster. I do have a provocotive title (Am I being a tease? The poster is titled “Birding ≠ Bird Conservation”) so I’ll see if that gets me in trouble from any birding environmental educators.

I’ll be tweeting the WEEC confrence using the #weec5 hastag. Follow along and add your own voice if you’re going to be in Montreal. Tweeting confrences seems to be de rigeur for tech confrences. We’ll see if anyone in EE is into twittering too.