How To Tell a More Effective Story About Environmental Education

How to Tell a More Effective Story About Environmental Education

Published: November 2020

Written by: Jessica Moyer, Anne Marie Trester, Jennifer Nichols

It would be hard to overstate the importance and role of environmental education in
ensuring both human and planetary wellbeing. After all, we can’t fully appreciate and
utilize, much less steward and maintain, what we don’t sufficiently understand. More
specifically, as experts know well and a mountain of evidence corroborates, the positive
impacts of environmental education are experienced acutely in many sectors of society,
such as public health, conservation, K-12 education, child development, and social
justice. Among the general public, however, the connection between environmental
education and these other social issue areas is poorly understood.

Given the complexity of such relationships, as well as the intricacy of the processes they implicate—including how we learn, how inequities are perpetuated, and how social
factors affect the health of an entire community—conveying the true value of
environmental education can be a heavy lift. Fortunately, an evidence-based framing
strategy can significantly lighten the load.

The following guide equips environmental education advocates to communicate in
ways that help the public connect essential dots. We know from FrameWorks’ extensive research in several relevant issue areas that it is not enough to simply assert that environmental education delivers significant benefits: we must demonstrate how those benefits are delivered by highlighting the associated mechanisms. The tools offered here were designed, developed, and tested to help communicators achieve this goal.

By adopting a shared and empirically proven framing strategy, advocates, educators,
program leaders, and other communicators can tell a more effective story about
environmental education: what it entails, how it works, and why it’s essential to our
current health and happiness as well as future prospects. Most importantly, a shared
framing strategy will assist the field in providing a clear and compelling vision for how
we can work together to strengthen and expand access to environmental education
opportunities for everyone.

Read the full report here