TALATERRA Tania Marien

Maria Coryell-Martin is an expeditionary artist.

That’s right.

Expeditionary, as in expeditions. What type of imagery does this bring up? If you imagine an artist traveling with a scientist or an explorer, you are imagining things correctly.

This episode originally aired in 2019. Back then, Maria took a few moments to speak with me while she was packing for her trip to meet a scientist in Alaska.

In this episode, we discuss Maria’s journey from student to artist, how she has sustained herself as a working artist, and the three questions she answers before taking on new projects.

Plus, I have exciting updates to share. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Maria.

Wendy Nadherny Fachon is an author, journalist, podcast host and environmental educator. Her work is published by Natural Awakenings Magazine, Sustainable Living News, and Dreamvisions 7 Radio.

After working many years in the healthcare industry, Wendy left her position to focus on children's health and wellness issues. She developed an afterschool walking program, which gave rise to her radio show, the Story Walking Radio Hour.

How did Wendy develop her afterschool program?
What is her radio show about?
How does she approach partnership building, which has been critical to her success?

Let's find out.

Today, we get to learn from Gloria Desanker, geospatial storyteller, founder, and Principal Consultant at Map Nerd Consulting.
Gloria is also a Civics and Environmental Education - Change Fellow. She is a member of the 2023 cohort of educators and community leaders participating in a fellowship program hosted by the North American Association for Environmental Education. In this program, she is developing a GIS curriculum specifically for and by Black people and the Black African diaspora. Her objective is to provide the training that will lead to a more accurate representation of Black people in communities and more informed conversations about the impact of climate change.

In this episode, we have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Tom Rhoads, an economist and professor at Towson University.

Dr. Rhoads shares his transition from sports economics to environmental economics and his research integrating economics into environmental education.

Dr. Rhoads explains that his interest in environmental education began about five years ago when he noticed a shift in the demographics of his class, with more environmental science and studies majors than economics majors. This led him to change his approach to teaching environmental economics, focusing more on the environment and finding the economics within it.

Today is part 2 of this conversation. In this episode, I sit down with Mike Mayer to discuss his specialty (environmental education) and to learn more about the environmental program that inspires what he, Bill, and Lars do at EID.

We begin this episode by learning more about the Institute for Earth Education. Some of this may sound familiar because I included a short segment in Part 1. Don’t let this distract you because you’ll hear something a bit different before Mike walks us through an example of the type of programming offered by the Institute.

In this conversation, Mike and I also discuss creating holistic experiences in free-choice settings, the AMORE framework developed by Steve Van Mater, interpreting global topics across cultures, and what might change the status quo in environmental education.

In this episode, we meet the co-founders of Experiential Interpretive Design (EID) -- Bill Reynolds, Lars Wohlers, and Mike Mayer. Collectively, they have many years of experience in interpretation and experience design and bring to EID the experience they gained from various roles in tourism, planning, heritage interpretation, environmental education, and coaching. We learn about the founders, why they started EID Coaching, and discuss what is working in the field of interpretation and what is not working. This is the first installment of a two-part episode.

In Part 2 of this episode, I sit down with Mike Mayer to learn more about the environmental education program that inspires the work he, Bill, and Lars do at EID.