Adult stakeholder perceptions of 4th grade participation in children’s forest environmental education programming

Abstract

An environmental education (EE) consortium located in the pacific northwest United States coalesced an external evaluation team to research its K-5 EE programming. The purpose of this article is to describe one phase of this program evaluation process including the exploration of adult stakeholder perceptions of EE programming accessed by 4th grade children. The author highlights the goals of the consortium and the context for the program evaluation, and the relevant literature addressing adult perspectives on EE is reviewed. The study framing, method, and qualitative results are reported. Findings suggest that adult stakeholders perceived positive impacts from 4th grade participation in EE, though the programming was viewed as being most beneficial to children coming from economically disadvantaged families. Implications for EE practice and research are discussed.

Keywords:

• Constructivism
• economically disadvantaged
• K-5
• environmental education
• thematic analysis

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the regional Children’s Forest (and its partners) discussed in this article. The author additionally thanks Alyssa Lopez for her many hours of research support in collecting and coding data; Sean Ferrell and Katie Chipko for facilitating many of the study logistics; and Drs. Christina Cid, Vincent Francisco, Elizabeth Marino, Dana Whitelaw, and Chris Wolsko for their ongoing consultation and expertise throughout the project.