Highlighting 20+ Years of Partnerships Between a Nature Center and Local Schools

Abstract

Partnerships between schools and out-of-school organizations (museums, zoos, nature centers, etc.) have been shown to improve the educational experiences for both students and teachers. In this article, we report on the experiences we have documented as a nature center through our active involvement in school partnerships. Our partnerships with schools have persisted for 20+ years, led to multi-encounter and district-wide programming across multiple grade bands, and included suburban, urban, and rural/regional school districts. We have found that for these partnerships to flourish, it is crucial to consider the four C’s: Communal objectives, Consistent communication, Cultivated trust and respect, and Clearly defined roles. Using examples from two of our many school and field-based programs, we describe how the four C’s have influenced our success in creating and maintaining school partnerships. Here, we provide examples of the types of programming we offer and the materials we provide with this programming. Our programming is adaptable per teacher/school needs and grounded in the state science standards. We have found that the key to providing programming with schools through these partnerships is to supplement teachers’ instructional goals in ways that they find meaningful for their specific context.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.