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Environmental Education Specialist – Role and Specifications
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An increased awareness of one's surroundings coupled by a further rise in consciousness to the environment has now led to a great demand for environment education specialists who can cater to the needs of various organizations in this category.
The job of an environment education specialist entails jobs of various kinds and natures, focused typically towards the target of maintaining and ensuring environment-friendly practices for the entire work system.
Key Roles
To begin with, an environment education specialist is responsible for creating awareness of the basic relationships between human activity and natural environment. This primarily involves developing and promoting strategies that are intended to encourage others to make responsible choices regarding consumer decisions, government policies and corporate responsibilities.
There are a vast range of other special duties that are to be performed by the environment education specialists working in a particular organization. Conducting research on specific issues such as consumerism, lifestyle choices, resource development, wildlife management and forestry is one of the fist duties enlisted. Others include assimilating environmental information from many sources and making it understandable to others though written articles and presentations, teaching course and leading workshops on the subject.
Such specialists are also responsible for interpreting natural and human history through field study groups and school programs, educating the public though newspaper, magazine, radio, television and internet. Most importantly, an environment education specialist is responsible for integrating environmental education into traditional subject areas such as science, social studies, economics, language arts and mathematics.
Besides, there are various areas of specialized activities that the environment education specialists might choose to enroll in. These might include providing information about consumer goods and services that might influence living or purchasing habits, providing information that empowers people to take action of the environment in the work place and building capacity in communities, schools and businesses to create and deliver their own environmental education programs.
For an individual to qualify and train as an environment education specialist, he/she also needs to have a set of important personal characteristics in order to perform the job well.
The most important amongst these include strong interpersonal, communication and problem solving skills, interest in environmental issues, analytical skills required to determine the validity of information, strong writing skills, ability to work collaboratively with diverse groups of people and research and consulting skills that might be required to assess needs and develop potential action plans.
Some of the most prominent organizations employing such environment education specialists include the environmental and conservation societies, naturalist clubs, school boards, outdoor education enters and government departments.
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