KAEE 50th Annual Conference

Over five months, FCPS students and community partners rolled up their sleeves and asked the hard questions, gathered real data, and let equity guide their conclusions.  Working within the Trust for Public Land's Community Schoolyard framework — which transforms asphalt-heavy schoolyards into vibrant, green community spaces — students and partners examined the full landscape of FCPS schools through a multi-criteria lens: Where are health and economic disparities most acute? Where is the urban tree canopy thinnest? Where do residents lack safe, walkable access to green space? Which neighborhoods bear the greatest burden of environmental pollution?  Where could a community schoolyard do the most good?The result was a student-driven Community Schoolyard Feasibility Study that was both rigorous and deeply human. Through Narrative 4's Story Exchange workshop, students, teachers, and community partners engaged in a structured yet intimate practice: listening to one another's stories, then retelling them in the first person. The outcome is not mere sympathy but genuine perspective-shifting — a proven catalyst for empathy, trust, and collective action.This session will walk participants through the full arc: how the partnership was structured, how the feasibility criteria were developed and applied, what the Story Exchange workshop looked like in practice, and what the students found.  Participants will leave with practical tools, a replicable framework and a vivid example of what becomes possible when students are trusted as researchers, advocates and changemakers.  

Let's get outdoors on the Legacy Trail and take a journey through time, with just our walking shoes. No flux capacitor needed! This most excellent adventure will connect our personal stories to the history of KEEC and EE. All ages, experience levels, and abilities are welcome. Before we return to the present, we will share our visions for the future, and how we can build on this EE legacy for others. Allons-y!
 

Join us for a two-for-one tour! We’ll start with a visit to Lexington’s only air monitoring station, which houses state and federal air monitoring equipment. The data collected at this station tells us whether Lexington is meeting federal clean air standards. (Hint: It is!) Next, we’ll visit Lexington’s recycling center for a fascinating, behind-the-scenes tour of this amazing facility, which diverts 23,000 tons of recyclable material each year from the landfill. Registration is limited to 12; van transportation provided to both facilities.
Meet in the atrium, near registration.

Have you ever needed a specific type of map but can't find one that fits your needs? Dive into an introductory session on the wonders of digital mapping and how you can create your very own maps for all of your needs. Digital mapping can provide a wonderful resource for a multitude of needs, not just navigation. In this session, you will learn basic map terminology to get started, what types of data we can display, and follow along as we create a map as a class. Primary software used for this session will be QGIS (free) and ArcGIS Online (paid). Feel free to bring your own device if you would like to follow along. You do NOT need any prior experience to join this session!

Parks as Portals is a community-centered environmental education model rooted in Kentucky’s public lands and Black ecological legacy. Born from one educator’s experience at Mammoth Cave, it centers community knowledge holders as co-teachers, restores erased BIPOC histories, and offers a framework for renewing educators through place, partnership, and truth.


In 2023,  during KAEE's conference, Milan Bush walked into Mammoth Cave as an environmental educator and came out changed. Not just by the cave's scale, but by what it held. The memory of Stephen Bishop, an enslaved man who mapped those passages, had never fully left that place. It was waiting. That experience planted the seed for Parks as Portals.


Three presenters bring distinct perspectives: the GGBM founder shares the framework’s origin and community-rooted design; Shaniqua Robertson, Executive Director of ATBHK, presents the integration of Black Kentucky history into place-based environmental contexts; and Ebony Freeman, a Berea College preservice teacher candidate, shares what it means to encounter this model as a future educator, what shifts when community knowledge comes first. A facilitated discussion invites participants to apply the framework to their own communities, followed by collective sense-making and a practical takeaway structure.


This in-progress project investigates: (1) How does historically grounded, place-based environmental education shift BIPOC learners’ sense of ecological identity and belonging in natural spaces? (2) How does centering community knowledge holders as co-educators affect teacher renewal and long-term professional sustainability?


The model is grounded in Freire’s (1970) pedagogy of the oppressed and hooks’ (1994) vision of embodied, socially just teaching, learning as liberation, and community wisdom as curriculum. Place-based education theory (Gruenewald, 2003; Sobel, 2004) anchors the use of land itself as the primary teacher. Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth framework shapes how BIPOC ecological knowledge is treated as foundational strength, not absence. Finney’s (2014) scholarship on Black Americans and the outdoors grounds the Kentucky-centered historical content directly.


Curriculum units are being piloted through ATBHK. Preservice candidates at Berea College are among the first cohort of learners engaging the model. This workshop shares early-stage findings and invites the research community into the work not as an audience, but as collaborators.


This work arrives at a moment of urgent need. In April 2026, the Sierra Club and a coalition of more than 25 Kentucky organizations formally opposed federal executive orders threatening to remove historically grounded interpretation from national park sites across the state. The stories targeted include the exact histories at the heart of Parks as Portals — Stephen Bishop, the Bransford family, and the enslaved African American guides whose knowledge, labor, and skill built Mammoth Cave into the landmark it is today. When the federal government moves to erase these stories from the land itself, community-led environmental education is not supplemental. It is essential. Parks as Portals exists to ensure that no matter what is removed from a sign or a visitor center, these histories live in our learners, our teachers, and our communities.

Whether you need to communicate about a policy, program or research project, focusing on the people can be an effective choice. Highlighting the people who are involved — researchers, students, people who will be impacted and more — can help your audience connect with your communication on a personal level. This session will cover the basics of each step, from brainstorming to interviewing and gathering information to finalizing deliverables, including written pieces and social media posts. 

YLEX Works, a career and life readiness program for high school juniors and seniors, was developed in 2025, soft-launched in January 2026, and officially launched in August 2026. This program functions in partnership with Fayette County tech school, The HILL, and centers education, exposure, and praxis. Students enrolled in this program attend weekly in-class career preparation lessons, regular field trips and job shadowing on city environmental job sites, and participate in summer internships and senior year co-ops. This session will begin with a program overview and flow into strategies for developing similar programming in your community. We will address curriculum and program development, time commitments, needed partnerships, funding, and target audiences.  

Appalachia is often portrayed through a narrow lens with an outdated perspective that overlooks the region's diverse ecology, deep cultural history, and contributions to environmental knowledge. Kentucky sits at the crossroads between rural Appalachian communities and urban populations, creating a unique opportunity to expand how environmental education is taught - and who teaches it - throughout the state. 
This session invites learners to engage in Appalachia as a living, ecologically and culturally rich region and explore how rural perspectives can strengthen environmental education in urban spaces. Inspired by informal and formal place-based education in eastern Kentucky, educators will participate in collaborative discussions and activities to reimagine common environmental education topics - water systems, community-based knowledge, and climate education - through an Appalachian lens grounded in the lived relationships with the land. Attendees will leave the session with strategies to connect urban students with rural perspectives and landscapes, expand definitions of knowledge-holders, and teach environmental topics with methods that are more inclusive of and celebratory towards the Appalachian region. 

Does the idea of running a community event feel overwhelming? Or are you just looking for ways to make planning easier? Join this session to get tips and tricks on how to plan and manage community events in a way that won’t make you pull your hair out!

The mission of the Kentucky Master Naturalist Volunteer Program is to develop a cohort of well-informed volunteers to advance education, research, and outreach efforts dedicated to the conservation and management of natural resources and natural areas within their communities for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. 
Becoming a KY Master Naturalist Volunteer requires an initial training with 40 hours of instruction and 40 hours of volunteer service. This training covers core content related to Ecoregions of Kentucky, Ecological Concepts, Archeology, Geology, Soils, Entomology, Weather and Climate, Water Resources, Botany (woody and herbaceous), Safety and Health, Invasive Species, Wildlife, Environmental Education and Ethics, Citizen Science and more. This program was developed by the University of Kentucky Cooperative Extension with valuable input and contributions from stakeholders at public and private organizations. Currently, there are over 550 Kentucky Master Naturalists, with at least one new training cohort offered each year. In 2025, Master Naturalists volunteer 7,903 hours with an estimated value to the commonwealth of $275,945.  

Understanding sustainability in our world today and connecting the dots. Explaining the Mitigating Human Behavior in Favor of the Planet initiative.

This presentation explores Payne Hollow on the Ohio through the lived experience and writings of Harlan Hubbard, using the three volumes of OYO: An Ohio River Anthology as a lens to understand the Ohio River as both a physical and philosophical landscape, grounded in the history and ecology of Payne Hollow.  Payne Hollow is a forested limestone hollow along the river in Trimble County, Kentucky,   The session weaves together art, literature, environmental science, and regional history to illustrate how Hubbard’s life and work embody an interdisciplinary model of environmental education, where close observation, self-sufficiency, and creative expression deepen our understanding of place, and where the Ohio River becomes not just a waterway, but a teacher, a narrative thread, and a living system connecting culture, ecology, and community;  this talk highlights how these insights inform current efforts in conservation, education, and public engagement along the river corridor.

If you-I mean, your STUDENTS-scream whenever a crawling creature appears, you may need this class. Attendees will learn hands-on, engaging techniques and activities to help kids (and adults!) realize that bugs are actually superheroes, not tiny monsters! 

We will present an overview of the Lesson Plan -Tool Kit, with a hands on project.

In 2016, The Parklands of Floyds Fork started the S.E.E.D. Program (Stewardship, Education, Exploration, Discovery) to provide engaging, science-based outdoor education to low income, title 1 schools in the Louisville area. The S.E.E.D. program works to remove barriers to participation by providing free field trips and outreach programs for title 1 schools in the Louisville area while also covering the cost of bus transportation. Partner schools receive at least four free programs per school year. Since 2016 the program has grown from 1,000 student experiences per year to nearly 15,000.


What began as a purely science-based program has expanded to many different subject areas and even into pure outdoor recreation. As environmental educators we strive to align our programs with Next Generation Science Standards and school core curriculum so we can ensure a meaningful and valuable experience for students and teachers but also to create buy-in from school administrations. But as environmental educators we also know that exploration and free time outdoors can be just as valuable as curriculum-based learning. We always want to meet our groups where they are and provide what they need out of the experience. So, when Iroquois High School P.E. teacher DeAldon Watson wanted to set up hiking field trips for his students, The Parklands wanted to help.


During this session we will highlight a 3-year partnership between The Parklands of Floyds Fork and Iroquois High School. In 2023, P.E. teacher DeAldon Watson brought select students from his P.E. class to The Parklands for a hike. His goal- to introduce students to healthy, lifelong recreation options like hiking. That first hike was a chilly 1.5 mile walk on the Limestone Gorge trail. No teaching stops, no curriculum topic, no activities, just a group of 40 high school students hiking in the woods. The program was an immediate hit with students. They felt confident, adventurous, and had a ton of fun.


Since that initial hike, the partnership has expanded to bi-monthly field trips throughout the school year and in all seasons including activities like hiking, biking, kayaking, fishing, and archery. As part of The Parklands S.E.E.D. Program, all field trips are provided for free with The Parklands paying for bus transportation.
Parklands Director of Education Curtis Carman and Iroquois High School teacher DeAldon Watson will highlight what it takes on both sides to make a partnership like this work for high school students including getting administration buy-in, barriers to participation, ideas on how to engage a high school audience with the outdoors, and how to create sustainable funding.


Participants will walk away with a better understanding of how to create lasting partnerships with high school students as well as a reaffirmed appreciation for outdoor recreation.

Looking back isn’t always clean. It’s layered, imperfect, and often full of lessons we didn’t realize we were learning at the time.


After nine years of building and sustaining the Environmental Education Leadership Corps AmeriCorps program, we’ve gathered insights that go far beyond our specific work- lessons that apply to any program, partnership, or initiative trying to make a lasting impact.


This story-driven session invites participants to learn from our evolution as an inter-organizational program: What worked, what didn’t, and what we’d do differently if we were starting today.


Together, we’ll explore:
- Why slow, intentional growth can be a program’s greatest strength,
- How to stay realistically optimistic in the face of challenges,
- What it means to find and sustain joy in impact-driven work,
- How to think about long-term member impact beyond service terms,
- And what it really takes to build something that lasts.


This session isn’t just about reflection- it’s about equipping attendees with practical insights they can apply immediately.


Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of how to:

1. Avoid common early-stage pitfalls
2. Build programs with longevity in mind
3. Center people, not just outputs, in their design
4. Carry lessons forward to strengthen future impact