Environmental Leadership in Practice

This week’s posting in The Stream comes from guest blogger Hernan Gallo-Cornejo from Pitzer College (’17) and the Middlebury School of the Environment (’15).  Hernan recently attended the North American Association of Environmental Education conference in San Diego.  There he presented a paper on the work he carried out with Dr. Curt Gervich in the MSoE class “Wicked Environmental Problems,” putting his skills as a persuasive speaker to the test.  Here’s Hernan’s description of his experiences there:

“On October 15th and 16th, I attended the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) conference to represent the School of the Environment! My professor from the School of the Environment, Curt, and I lead a workshop on systems thinking and environmental educational games to a group of over 30 people. In this workshop, I shared my experience with creating an educational game on sanitation in India throughout the course of four weeks in my Wicked Problems in Environmental Policy class this past summer. Creating a game for the first time was frightening at first, but I was able to collaborate with my classmates to create an entire game that the School of the Environment played during our last week of the program. I really enjoyed having a creative final assignment for the course because it pushed me to think in a unique way about the topic.

As I presented on my experience at the NAAEE conference, several people asked detailed questions about the game I created and how I went about doing it. Since most of the people in the room had never created a game before, they really wanted to know how in depth our game-making process was so that they can effectively create their own environmental educational games to share with others. Although I was one of the youngest attendees of the conference, I was able to apply the leadership skills I acquired at the School of the Environment to confidently present to and interact with my audience. I hope to continue using the skills and knowledge I received at the School of the Environment and share them with others to create change in the environmental movement.”

Hernan Gallo

Middlebury School of the Environment ‘15

Pitzer College ‘17

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