The Center for Children's Literature and Culture at the University of Florida, the Howe Society, the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida with the Public Interest Environmental Conference (PIEC) and the National Association of Environmental Law Societies (NAELS) present:
Transforming Encounters III: Children and the Environment
John Cech is the Director of the Center for Children's Literature and Culture at the University of Florida. He produces and hosts the daily public radio program "Recess!" http://www.recess.ufl.edu about the cultures of childhood. He is a past president of the Children's Literature Association and currently serves on the advisory boards of the Institute for Children's and Adolescent Research and Evaluation, the Weston Woods Institute, and the Chicago Children's Humanities Festival. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, plays, and books for children and adults, including a study of the work of Maurice Sendak, Angels and Wild Things. He teaches courses in children's and adolescent literatures and cultures at the University of Florida.
Susan Jaye Dauer teaches in the English department at Valencia Community College, East Campus, in Orlando, Florida. She also teaches an online course based on writing about science fiction and fantasy. She has written and presented widely on issues relating to extrapolative fiction and feminism. She is an award-winning author of short fiction and is currently working on several creative projects. Her article “From Teaching in Class to Teaching Online: Preserving Community and Communication” appeared in Teaching Literature, a collection of essays (Palgrave).
Sid Dobrin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida. He is the author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of a number of books about nature, environment, and writing, including: Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, and Nature (with Sean Morey, forthcoming 2006), Cracks in the Mirror: The Artifice of Nature (forthcoming 2007), Playing with Mother Nature: Video Games, Space and Ecology (with Laurie Taylor and Cathlena Martin, forthcoming 2008), Saving Place (2005), Writing Environments (with Christopher J. Keller, 2005), Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism (with Kenneth Kidd, 2004), Natural Discourse (with Christian R. Weisser, 2002), Distance Casting: Words and Ways of the Saltwater Fishing Life (2002), and Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches (with Christian R. Weisser, 2001). Sid is also a PADI dive instructor, a licensed boat captain, and a wilderness guide. When not writing, he spends most of his time in, on, and under the water with his wife and son.
Nancy Feresten has been editing children’s books for over 20 years. After earning a degree in English Literature from Yale, she began her career at Harper & Row and has since worked at W. H. Freeman, Scholastic, and National Geographic, where she is now Vice President, Editor-in-Chief of National Geographic Children’s Books, an imprint that specializes in children’s nonfiction and reference.
Donald Forgione is Bureau Chief for the Florida State Parks’
Northeast District, covering 38 parks in 19 counties and totaling more than
106,000 acres. With more than 60 miles of coastline, the district ecosystems
encompass everything from dunes to sandhills, and pine flatwoods to swamps
and prairie. District parks are home to many threatened and endangered species
including sea turtles, manatees, gopher tortoises, and, occasionally, whooping
cranes.
With over 22 years of formal interpretive experience in park settings, Donald
shares his passion for Florida’s land and history with diverse audiences.
He makes complex and sometimes controversial issues accessible to everyone
from elementary aged children to government policy makers. He’s driven
by the belief that we cannot interpret the environment without understanding
human behavior and cultural influences. Donald works from his Gainesville
office on the north rim of Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park.
Robert Hutchinson has been involved in land conservation efforts
for three decades. As a video producer, his programs have highlighted forest
and water management issues. As a land acquisition professional, he has worked
for The Nature Conservancy and Alachua Conservation Trust, where he currently
serves as a Project Manager. Hutch has been involved with land transactions
totaling more than 10,000 acres. As a County Commissioner, he spearheaded
Alachua County Forever, a land conservation bond referendum. He also contributed
to revisions of the comprehensive plan that include strategic habitat conservation
areas, which will protect uplands, revisions that are similar to some of the
protections afforded to wetlands.
Hutch graduated from Emory University, and attended graduate school at UF
in Urban and Regional Planning. He has served as Director of Gainesville's
Downtown Redevelopment Agency and of the Southeastern Forest Trust, and as
Development Director for the Florida Museum of Natural History. Hutch performs
with the Weeds of Eden, a musical group specializing in bio-regional tunes.
He and his wife, Meg, live in the intentional community of Flamingo Hammock,
when they are not sailing one of their three sailboats.
Kenneth Kidd is the author of numerous articles about children's
literature and culture, and, most recently, of Making American Boys: Boyology
and the Feral Tale (University of Minnesota Press), a cross-disciplinary
study of discourses of boyhood in and around realistic fiction, self-help
writing, film, and psychoanalytic literature. He is the co-editor, with Sidney
I. Dobrin, of the anthology, Wild Things: Children's Culture and Ecocriticism.
Kenneth is at work on several projects, including an essay on children's literature
and trauma; a longer study of children's book awards, cultural capital, and
the American public sphere; and a collection of essays provisionally called
Into the Archive: Reading the Baldwin, to be coedited with Baldwin
Curator, Rita Smith. Kenneth's other research interests include nineteenth-
and twentieth-century American literature, gender studies/queer theory, and
environmental studies. He is an Associate Professor of English Department
at the University of Florida, where he also serves as Associate Director of
the Center for Children's Literature and Culture, as well as the graduate
coordinator for the Department of English.
Kathy Lehnhardt’s career goal for the past 30 years has
been delivering wildlife conservation messages to visitors of all ages. She
began her career as a volunteer at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo in 1973
and interned there with the newly formed Education Department. In 1980, Kathy
became the Interpretive Officer in the Calgary Zoo’s Education Department.
As an education specialist at the National Zoo, Kathy partnered with the Smithsonian’s
National Museum of Natural History and National Portrait Gallery on a conservation
awareness program for middle school students and assisted in the development
of the Reptile Discovery Center, a project funded by the National Science
Foundation. From June 1997 through the present, Disney’s Animal Kingdom
has been “home.”
At Disney’s Animal Kingdom, there is an unparalleled opportunity to impact
a larger audience than ever before with wildlife conservation messages. Currently,
her work includes leading an education team of 27, conducting the course “Conservation
Education: Inspiring our Guests Through Interpretation” for all animal
programs staff, creating young children activities at the six Kids Discovery
Club sites around the Park, and initiating on-going assessment projects to
measure effectiveness of conservation messages. Recently, she has been charged
with a more global conservation role to develop educational materials and
training programs for field conservation projects such as Florida sea turtles,
Kalinzu Forest Reserve in Uganda, and partnering with the Baranquilla Zoo
in Colombia to focus on cotton-top tamarins. She serves as the education advisor
to AZA’s Elephant TAG/SSP committee and as Board member/Web Editor for
the International Zoo Educators Association.
Richard Louv is a futurist and journalist focused on family,
nature and community. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently,
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder
(Algonquin). Among his other books are Childhood's Future (Anchor),
The Web of Life, (Conari), Fly-Fishing for Sharks: An Angler's Journey
Across America (Simon & Schuster), and America II (Houghton
Mifflin). He is a columnist for The San-Diego Union-Tribune and has
written for other newspapers and magazines. He also served as a columnist
and member of the editorial advisory board for Parents magazine, and
as a commentator on Monitor Radio.
He is an advisor to the Ford Foundation's Leadership for a Changing World
award program and the Scientific Council on the Developing Child, and a Visiting
Scholar at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis
University. He is also a partner in The Frameworks Institute and a member
of the Citistates Group, an association of urban observers. He helped found
Connect for Kids, the largest child advocacy site on the World Wide Web. Louv
has appeared on many television and radio programs. The United Nations commissioned
his monograph on fatherhood for the U.N. Year of the Child, and he has spoken
before the National Policy Council in the White House. He speaks frequently
around the country. He is married to Kathy Frederick Louv and is the father
of two young men, Jason, 23 and Matthew, 17.
Michelle H. Martin, an associate professor of English at Clemson
University, teaches children’s and young adult literature, women’s
studies, and laptop composition. Her book Brown Gold: Milestones of African
American Children’s Picture Books, 1845-2000 was published by Routledge
in 2004. She is also co-editing an anthology with Claudia Nelson of Southwest
Texas University on Anglophone sex education manuals. Martin has published
articles in Children’s Literature Quarterly, The Lion and the Unicorn,
Horn Book, The Five Owls, and Teaching and Learning Literature.
She lives in Clemson, South Carolina, with her two dogs, her daughter, and
her husband, whom she married in May 2001, on the twentieth anniversary of
their first date.
Annie Whittaker Pais is the founding President of the Artists Alliance of North Florida (AAONF) and serves as Director of Artists Reaching Through Teaching (ARTT), the educational component of the AAONF. For twenty years, Pais has worked to bring the role of creativity into the work of a wide array of institutions. Her experience and love of art have contributed to her unique philosophy and original teaching methods. Pais served as administrator of Loblolly Learning Community, an experimental elementary school in Gainesville, Florida, and continues to teach, lead retreats, and conduct seminars on a regular basis. She served as arts columnist for the Gainesville Sun, and is a tireless activist for community arts awareness, an art advisor for corporate art collecting, and an arts event coordinator. Pais has worked as a professional artist for thirty years following study at Syracuse University. Born in Greenwich, Connecticut, to two artist parents, Pais has lived and worked in North Florida for more than twenty-five years and is the mother of three grown children.
Rita Smith received her Masters Degree in Library Science at the University of Michigan. She has taught English in the public schools in the United States and English as a Foreign Language in Cochabamba, Bolivia, SA. At the University of Florida Libraries she has worked in Acquisitions, Reference and Cataloging and since 1989 she has been on the staff of the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature. In 1996, she was appointed the Curator of the Baldwin Library, which is now part of the Department of Special and Area Studies Collections. Rita also serves as Associate Director of the Center for Children's Literature and Culture at the University of Florida and is a regular contributor to the radio program, "Recess." Rita has been an active member of the American Library Association and is currently a member of the Caldecott Award Selection Committee.
Mike Spranger is Assistant Director of Florida Sea Grant Extension and Assistant Dean for Environmental and Natural Resources Programs with the University of Florida/IFAS Extension. Mike has 30 years of professional experience in university and extension and outreach activities, teaching and applied research at the local, state, regional and national levels. He has previously worked at the University of Washington, Washington State University, and University of Wisconsin. He has served in a number of leadership roles nationally in the educational field, including serving as chair of the National Assembly of Sea Grant Extension Program Leaders and President of the National Marine Educators Association. He has a PhD from Portland State University and M.S, M.A, and B.A degrees from the University of Wisconsin.
Stewart J. Thomas serves as Co-Director of the Artists Alliance of North Florida (AAONF) and the Florida’s Eden Project. An independent artist, master printer and designer for 25 years, his broad range of experience includes international education programming at the University of Pennsylvania Museum; arts and village education work in India; and consultation on emerging patterns in internet technologies. He presents on a variety of topics in the fields of history, creativity, and fine arts; and provides expertise in public relations strategy and events planning. Assistant Professor of Design at Drexel University for five years, Stewart holds a degree in History from Haverford College and a degree in Fine Arts from Philadelphia College of Art (University of the Arts). He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he maintains a studio and teaches weekly art classes for children and adults.