Presentations by ACEE

Please contact us if you are interested in having any these sessions at your event.

‘Leap into Action’ – a free teacher’s guide to environmental action

In this hands-on workshop we’ll help you identify links between your curriculum and action, and then do a number of activities from ‘Leap into Action,’ a superb – and free! – teacher activity guide that you’ll receive in this workshop. This guide was created for teachers and is full of lesson plans to help you prepare, inspire and support your students in conducting age-appropriate environmental action projects, including skill-building activities and tools and real-life case studies.

• Format: Workshop, we will need some space for hands-on activities
• Audience: teachers – all grades
• Presenter: Gareth Thomson and/or Christina Pickles

Five Minute Field Trips – a free teacher’s guide

This session profiles “Five Minute Field Trips”, a kind of ‘greatest hits’ compendium of experienced environmental educators’ favorite activities. The guide is designed for teachers and classes wishing to do simple and enjoyable outdoor environmental activities in their schoolyard. In this session we’ll “learn by doing” as many of these activities as possible. All participants will receive a free copy of the activity guide.

• Format: Workshop. This workshop can be done either indoors or outdoors.
• Audience: teachers – all grades, nature interpreters, camp counselors, day care workers, after school care leaders
• Presenter: Gareth Thomson and/or Christina Pickles

Environmental Storytelling

One of the best ways to teach a lesson is to tell a story. In this workshop you will learn simple storytelling techniques, identify important ‘teachable’ stories in your life, and craft a successful oral tale. The focus will be on telling the stories that demonstrate the positive environmental future we all want to see. Not only that – you’ll thrill to a gripping story of struggle, competition, life, and death that takes place in Christina’s worm composter!

• Format: Workshop
• Audience: teachers, other environmental educators
• Presenter: Christina Pickles

Greening your curriculum

Your curriculum is full of opportunities to help students learn about the environment. You’ll leave this hands-on workshop with a plan to create more learning experiences for your students that emphasize inquiry, real-world and community connections, integrated curricula, and opportunities for students to practice citizenship as they act on what they have learned. Environmental education IS excellent education! See a past example of a powerpoint from this session.

• Format: Workshop. We’ll need some tables and a venue suitable for group discussions.
• Audience: teachers – all grades
• Presenter: Gareth Thomson

Help for Green Teachers

As Kermit the Frog once said ‘It’s not easy being green.’ Environmentally-minded teachers sometimes suffer the ‘lone wolf syndrome,’ or encounter other obstacles. In this session we’ll look at some of the barriers you face, and then build bridges over each of these barriers. Gareth will inspire you by letting you hear the voices of students who have made a difference, and share his ‘top ten tips’ that allow green teachers like you to survive and thrive within the education system.

• Format: Workshop. We’ll need some tables and a venue suitable for group discussions.
• Audience: teachers – all grades
• Presenter: Gareth Thomson

Alberta, environment, education – and hope.

Want to give your students hope about the environment? Well, hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up! All teachers can provide a powerful antidote against environmental despair through simple hands-on student projects that help deliver on curriculum AND help students feel hopeful about the future. In this inspiring presentation Gareth will draw on cutting-edge educational research, recent polling, Inspiring Education, 21st Century Learning, and knowledge of some best practices of Alberta teachers and schools.

• Format: Keynote with powerpoint presentation, accompanied by some small group discussion.
• Audience: teachers – all grades
• Presenter: Gareth Thomson

Are our students ready to be environmental stewards?

The short answer is ‘not so much’ – BUT we have some good news for you too! We recently commissioned pollster Ipsos Reid to poll over 500 Albertan students – and 800 adults – to measure their environmental citizenship. In this session you’ll learn what we found, review recent research on how to help students become environmental citizens – plus links to 21 Century Learning – and discuss with your teaching colleagues how to weave ‘environment’ into the curriculum you teach.

• Format: Keynote with powerpoint presentation, accompanied by some small group discussion. Can also be a workshop
• Audience: teachers, parents
• Presenter: Gareth Thomson

Presenter biographies

Gareth Thomson is Executive Director of the Alberta Council for Environmental Education. He has over twenty years experience in environmental education and non-profit management, working for the government of Alberta and then as Education Director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS). He has taught high school, served on Canmore town council, been a judge for the Alberta Emerald Awards, and currently volunteers for the Alberta Ecotrust Foundation on their grant review committee. He has an engineering degree, an M.Sc. in Environmental Geology, and is a certified teacher. A proud father of two exceptional children, Gareth can still occasionally be sighted on the hiking trails around Canmore.

Christina Pickles is the Program Coordinator for ACEE. A summer Naturalist position in 1998 hooked her on environmental education. After finishing a geography degree at the University of Calgary, she took her first full time job in education delivering programs for Ducks Unlimited at the Bow Habitat Station in Calgary. She then took a position with the University of Calgary, spending four years delivering and developing residential school programs on earthworms, forests and everything in between. Before coming to ACEE she spent two years in Edmonton with Alberta Environment’s One Simple Act program in Edmonton. She and her husband now live in Calgary overlooking the Elbow River.