KAEE 50th Annual Conference

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!
 

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.

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. 

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.