Friends of the Colorado River Foundation

Purpose Goals

Team Accomplishments

Lessons Learned Next Steps

Bilingual environmental education programming in the Texas Colorado River Watershed is imperative to its long-term vitality. The Texas Colorado River is a vital resource, providing drinking water for more than 2 million people, of which 400,000 are Spanish speakers. Given the threats of drought and �oods in central Texas, we have a responsibility to engage disadvantaged populations who are most vulnerable to the consequences of climate change. Last year, over 52% of our �eld trip attendees were an ethnic minority; the largest portion was Hispanic at 34%. In order to more e�ectively educate Hispanic students, the Colorado River Alliance is working towards providing full bilingual programming support by fall 2017.

Over the last 12 months, the Alliance took progressive steps to evolve a popular STEM-based outdoor �eld trip program to provide full support for native Spanish speakers. The �rst step was to translate the curriculum from English to Spanish taking into consideration di�erences in dialect. The next step was to recruit and train bilingual environmental educators. Bilingual education best practices in the Austin areas were also assessed by interviewing and observing organizations already o�ering bilingual education. Finally, trial bilingual �eld trips were conducted in fall 2016 and spring 2017.

The Alliance’s bilingual initiatives have been led by Daniela Pennycook, the Redbud Center Program Coordinator. Geo� Hensgen, the Colorado River Alliance program director has also supported the development of this program. Finally, bilingual interns including Vanessa Serrano, Camila Rivadeneyera, and Simone Ballard all played key roles in translating curriculum and leading “pilot” �eld trips.

Our pilot programs revealed two important challenges in developing bilingual programming. One challenge was that students possess a wide range of abilities across communication modalities in both En-glish and Spanish (i.e. reading, writing, speaking, and understanding verbal information). Furthermore, student communication capabilities are di�cult to estimate prior to �eld trips. Another challenge was coor-dinating schedules with schools needing bilingual programming with bilingual educators. To address these challenges, we have trained bilin-gual educators to act as “�oating instructors” who follow Hispanic stu-dents through each �eld trip, facilitating Spanish/English dialogue as necessary alongside educators teaching in English. The Alliance has re-cruited enough bilingual educators to support programming across the entire �eld trip schedule for Fall 2017. Additionally, all the �eld trip scripts used to train new docents and interns have been translated into Spanish, as well as all the �eld trip props and visual aids.

• It is essential for bilingual programming to support the range of bilingual capabilities in student groups attending the Redbud Center. Essential to meeting this requirement is to secure the needs of our clients well in advance of �eld trips, so that they can me matched with our educational resources. • Originally we wanted to o�er this program entirely in English or Spanish. The pilot projects listed above highlight the challenges we experienced as well as our solution. To address the coordination challenge, select bilingual docents and interns were trained to act as �oating educators that can add in any Spanish translations throughout the day. • The key experience to this project was the pilot programs we ran. These pilot programs highlighted some very important challenges that needed to be addressed from the beginning. I recommend to others that they carefully assess Bilingual education best practices in the Austin area, as well as, run pilot programs early in the development phases to ensure the challenges are clearly understood before investing signi�cant resources into the project.

The Colorado River Alliance has secured a full bilingual intern base for next fall which should remove the challenge of client and educator coordination. Additionally, these funds will be used to print or buy bilingual station resources including visual props. In the next year, the Alliance will o�er bilingual programing on any available �eld trip date. Additionally, we will continue to foster our connections to the Hispanic community and grow the capacity of bilingual programming at the Redbud Center.