Environmental Studies Jobs in Education and Academics: Training and Qualifications
Traditional environmental educators teach at various levels, including middle school, high school, and colleges and universities. The level that you choose will dictate the amount of education required for you to secure the proper credentials. Teaching at the middle and high school level requires a bachelor’s degree in education while college and university educators must have at least a master’s degree, and usually a doctorate.
Those teaching in nontraditional settings can bring quite a variety of degrees to any given job. Listings may state an education requirement in the following way: “biology, environmental science, or a related field.” The key here is the notion of a related field. If you can fulfill the basic position requirements, the actual major itself becomes less relevant.
Show That You Can Teach
Teaching is a skill, and like any other skill, it can be learned. No matter which environment you plan to teach in, you’ll need to prove that you can teach.
Middle and High Schools. Middle and high school science teachers who cover environmental issues usually prepare for their careers by completing a science education degree program. Such programs deliver content area such as biology, geology, chemistry, meteorology, resource issues, conservation, and geography in addition to courses that enable students to develop the skills necessary to handle a classroom, prepare lesson plans, and develop meaningful demonstrations, discussions, and other activities. The capstone for many of these courses of study includes a semester in which the student teacher leaves campus and actually teaches a course under the guidance of an experienced teacher. State certification often requires participation in the National Teachers Exam (NTE).
Teacher certification requirements vary from state to state. Some states have reciprocal certification agreements with a number of other states. You can check certification requirements on the Academic Employment Network website (academploy.com/resources.cfm). At the time of this writing, approximately forty-three states had certification requirements posted on the site.
Colleges. College and university teaching requires a terminal degree. This usually means completion of a doctorate. Some schools will, however, hire those who have completed all course work for the degree and lack only the dissertation. Junior and community colleges will sometimes hire full-time faculty with master’s degrees, but more often they are looking for those with a completed doctorate.
College and university teachers usually have not participated in formal education classes. Most often, college professors are thrown into the class room with little or no instruction on such topics as developing a syllabus, preparing for and delivering a lecture, or engaging students in classroom dialogue. Instead, they often model the style of their favorite professors, the ones who most inspired them, the teachers who most made them want to learn.
Nontraditional Settings. If your interest lies in working in nontraditional educational settings and you don’t have a degree in education, you’ll need to explain with concrete examples how your educational and work experiences have provided an opportunity for you to learn the teaching “tools of the trade.” This may be the time to do some extracurricular reading to learn more about education theory and how to educate populations of various ages. In any event, you will need to demonstrate very strong organizational and communication skills.