Colleen Kelley, our Education Director, and Jessica Schultz, our Sustainability & Living Building Coordinator, have both been accepted into the Environmental Sustainability for Latin American Professional Fellows Program.
Hitchcock Center environmental educators will be partnering with ten area schools thanks to over $36,000 in grant funding support from the Mass Cultural Council’s STARS (Students and Teachers working with Artists, Scientists, and Scholars) program.
Hitchcock Center educators develop and lead engaging professional development programs for K-12 teachers using real-life events. The recent Apollo 13 Challenge Professional Development workshop held on December 8th was no exception. Inspired by the film depicting America’s third Moon landing mission, Hitchcock environmental educators provided 60 Pre-K through 6th grade teachers in the Union 38 School District with a memorable learning experience that combined inquiry based science with “tinkering and making” skills that enhanced STE education (Science, Technology and Engineering) in their classrooms.
The entire Hitchcock community is deeply saddened by the sudden and unexpected death of Elizabeth Farnsworth. We will miss Elizabeth’s extraordinary talents, creativity, and compassion for all things living. Elizabeth had a long history with the Hitchcock Center as a board member, fundraiser, botanist, researcher, educator, and contributor. We are lucky to have had the privilege of knowing and working with her.
The results are in from this year’s 18th annual Biothon!
Hello and welcome to Nature Summer Camp 2017! We are incredibly excited for our first Nature Summer Camp at the new Hitchcock Center. The counselors, Katie and I have been as busy as beavers around here getting ready for the first day of camp next week. We can’t wait to meet all the campers! I am super thrilled about our staff. We are lucky to have three returning counselors, four fabulous new ones, and two wonderful support staff! And now, let’s introduce them one by one…
For three weeks in May, Cristian Velez from Iquitos, Peru and Carlos Macotela from San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico joined the Hitchcock Center staff to learn about educational methods and sustainability. Cristian and Carlos were participating in the Institute for Training and Development’s (ITD) Professional Fellows Program in Environmental Sustainability. The Professional Fellows Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, brings emerging leaders from around the world to the United States for intensive fellowships designed to gain knowledge of practices and techniques for working with different stakeholders toward environmental sustainability.
By Julie Johnson
After nearly 8 years of planning, designing and constructing the Hitchcock Center’s new living building, I attended the annual conference of the International Living Future Institute (ILFI) in Seattle, WA, the people who brought us the Living Building Challenge. Held over 5 days in May, the focus of this conference is more than simply how we can transform the built environment. It’s about how we can transform society.
Eric Thompson-Martin has just completed his junior at Amherst Regional High School. In his free time, he created an app called ECOmmute that encourages commuting by bike to reduce emissions. Have you tried it?
By Patrick O’Roark
I’d like to take a moment to step back and take a broad view of the Hitchcock Animal Care blog. The original impetus for writing it was that I was setting up our native species freshwater aquarium, which was a lengthy and very visible process. I was getting a lot of questions from both staff and the public who were curious as to how it was coming along and when they could expect to see fish in it. I wanted to be able to give a thorough response that could easily reach a lot of people. A blog that I could refer people to seemed like a great solution.
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Hitchcock Center for the Environment
at Hampshire College
845 West Street | Amherst MA 01002 | 413.256.6006 | 413.253.2809 fax