KAEE 50th Annual Conference

Cost: Free | Add a ticket to your order during conference registration.

Higher education professionals are invited to attend the Fall eeHEN Summit! The eeHEN is a network of professionals in higher education offering or supporting environmental education in their courses or programs. This network includes educators across many disciplines; from environmental science, engineering, aquatics, biology, chemistry, forestry, early childhood, formal education, recreation, natural resources, and beyond.

eeHEN connects you with educators and professionals across the state, offering opportunities to collaborate on projects, research, and initiatives. You'll gain access to valuable resources to help grow your program and provide students with hands-on experience, credentials, and career development in environmental education.

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.

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! 

In this interactive session, participants will explore undergraduate students’ reflections from "The Ecology of Middle-earth," an honors seminar linking ecocritical readings of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, reflective writing, and outdoor service-learning. Presenters will share the course structure, key assignments, and student reflections illustrating how the class sought to help learners navigate eco-anxiety and environmental grief while fostering hope, agency, and environmental responsibility through engagement in fantasy literature and ecological restoration work. The session will highlight how students connected their time in “Faerie”—that is, Tolkien’s fantasy realms— to their experiences planting trees at a surface mine reclamation site in Eastern Kentucky and other service learning projects. Through reflective discussion and hands-on activities, participants will consider the possibilities and challenges involved in “enchanting” environmental education through fantasy storytelling traditions while exploring how these approaches might translate to their own educational settings and communities.

With gas prices soaring, there’s never been a better time to train tomorrow’s drivers to make smart choices – choices that not only save fuel and money but protect the air we breathe. Join the Division for Air Quality’s Roberta Burnes for an experiential activity that will put fuel economy, carpooling, and riding the bus in perspective…literally!

Fayette County Public Schools is committed to building an ethos of social, economic, and ecological sustainability and regeneration by teaching our students, staff and families to understand themselves in an ecological context and to be aware of their relationship to our natural world.  To that end a 5-yr Sustainability Action Plan outlines goals in six priority areas: District Leadership, School Leadership, Facility & Campus Operations, Solid Waste, Instructional Alignment and Outdoor Learning.
But a Plan is only a plan until community ownership provides momentum and collective action.  To that end, FCPS launched a Superintendent’s Advisory Council on Sustainability (SACS) made up of six Working Groups.  Each Working Group is made up of representatives from each of the following stakeholder cohorts: student, parent, community partner, teacher, elected official, operations leader and district leader.  Informed and led by students’ lived experiences in our classrooms and on our campuses, each Working Group develops recommendations presented at an annual Student Sustainability Symposium.
Learn from FCPS’s mistakes and lessons-learned and apply a SACS framework replicable in district.