Consulting and Project Management Services
Experiential EE, LLC provides consulting and project management services on water resources topics for adult and youth audiences. We use creative strategies to develop, manage and assess high impact outreach projects.
Within our group of independent contractors, we have certifications/training in Project WET, Project WILD, Project Learning Tree, Bosque Education Guide and Leopold Education Project. We also have bi-lingual (Spanish, Portuguese) educators, and two professional musicians who are available to create or adapt songs on environmental education topics.
Our company provides the following services:
- Curriculum Development
- Classroom Outreach
- Public Outreach
- Event Production
- Teacher Professional Development
- Exhibit Curation
- Public Relations
- Marketing
- Assessment
- Reporting
Curriculum Development
You may be surprised to know that Experiential EE develops curricula only as a last resort! Instead, we strive to utilize existing curricula and educational tools from reputable water resources organizations such as the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Project WET, Water Education Foundation, The Groundwater Foundation and Enviroscape. This enables us to spend more time doing in-depth marketing and coordinating to ensure information gets into the hands of those who can make a difference, and that core concepts are understood by participants.
We do enjoy developing curricula and consulting on the development of curricula when there is a need to explain a unique local water resources issue, or when an emerging issue has few or no classroom materials. For example, Don’t Trash Our Río is a hands-on mathematics activity about the amount of trash collected in Albuquerque in 2009 before the trash made it into the Rio Grande. We created this activity to help RiverXchange participants grasp the significance of 22,000 cubic feet of trash. It is a difficult number to visualize for most people, let alone fifth graders!
Our RiverXchange® project includes a year-long curriculum, but the emphasis is on the topics to be covered rather than specific activities to be done. Written descriptions of hands-on activities are provided to teachers to help them cover a topic in the event a guest speaker cannot be secured.
Power Couple: The Shocking True Story of Water and Electricity is an educational video about the relationship between water and electricity. It was created by the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority and PNM. We helped initiate the development of this 8-minute video because there were no youth-based educational materials or curricula on this emerging national issue.
Classroom Outreach and Public Outreach
Experiential EE, LLC is available to conduct hands-on classroom presentations on water resources topics to students in grades K-12. We also offer presentations and puppet shows in Spanish. Our educator will visit your classroom with all necessary supplies to make a 45-60 minute hands-on presentation. We also are available to present to adults and youth in booth-type settings at public events. Experiential EE presents on a wide range of topics – from water cycle, watershed, drinking water, wastewater and water conservation – to water and energy, water pollution, water rights and macroinvertebrates. You name it!
Event Production
Since 2005, Experiential EE, LLC has produced children’s water festivals in Albuquerque, Rio Rancho and Santa Fe, including fundraising and all aspects of event project management. Today, all three municipalities have taken a leadership role in the financing and production of their own local water festival – our goal from the start! We continue to carry out a children’s water festival on behalf of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority, as part of a larger outreach contract. To learn more about the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Children’s Water Festival, click here.
Typically, we produce highly organized youth events in which all logistics are coordinated by us and all costs are covered by our sponsors. We maximize participant learning by requiring activities to be hands-on, by minimizing noise and visual distractions, and through close communication with our presenters and volunteers. When planning the event, we develop outcomes and then tie our program and evaluation tools to those outcomes. The success of our water festivals has everything to do with experience, attention to detail and persistence. We have had the good fortune of being involved in the production of more than a dozen water festivals.
Teacher Professional Development
Experiential EE will work with your agency or organization to coordinate and/or facilitate a workshop for formal and informal educators. We will bring participants up to speed about drinking water, wastewater, nonpoint source pollution and river ecosystem issues, and provide them with classroom resources and local contacts. Our goals are to teach formal and informal educators about water’s versatility as a theme to satisfy state curriculum standards and benchmarks not only in science, but also in mathematics, social studies and language arts – and then inspire them to incorporate water topics into their curriculum.
Exhibit Curation
A well-designed exhibit can be an important component of a larger program to educate the general public about water resources issues. Experiential EE will help your organization develop the exhibit concept, create text and/or develop a marketing strategy to get your exhibit seen by the public. We worked closely with Sightworks, an Albuquerque-based exhibit company, to develop our Water Wonders exhibit under contract to the New Mexico Environment Department.
Public Relations and Marketing
One of the most challenging components of outreach programming can be public relations and marketing – not because they are difficult but because, when done well, they take creative and persistent effort. Social change does not usually happen overnight! Experiential EE will work with your organization to develop and/or implement a marketing and public relations strategy that will bring your water resources outreach program to the target audience. Our forte is marketing outreach programs to schools/teachers.
Assessment
Experiential EE, LLC’s approach to assessment is unique because we are able to demonstrate impact of our programs – a difficult achievement in the world of informal education and public outreach. Three of our current projects – Albuquerque Bernalillo County Children’s Water Festival, in-class presentations and RiverXchange – incorporate student assessments. Two of these projects include pre- and post-event student surveys. The children’s water festival also incorporates an independent activity evaluation, teacher survey and volunteer survey. Our sponsors fund these assessment efforts because they realize the value of developing achievable outcomes and then implementing assessment tools that help us measure the degree to which those outcomes have been met. Experiential EE excels at helping your organization meet its bottom line through its outreach program.
Effective assessment tools provide highly useful feedback for everyone involved. For example, close communication between our festival organizers and festival presenters about students’ understanding of concepts covered at the children’s water festival has resulted in a performance improvement each of the past four years on the post-festival student survey. In other words, presenters have modified their activities and facilitation in direct response to information we have provided to them – with increasingly positive results. Overall results from the 2010 festival showed that 100% of students achieved competency in understanding all water concepts presented. For more information about the water festival and assessment analysis, see our 2010 Water Festival Annual Report.
Reporting
Detailed coordination, assessment analysis and report writing may make most people’s eyes glaze over. For us, the reporting process is our opportunity to finally tell the outreach project’s story to the public. As a project nears completion, we look forward to reflecting on the details, summarizing our experiences and making recommendations. To learn more about our 2010 Children’s Water Festival Annual Report, click here. To view our RiverXchange 2010 Report, click here.
|
