A Brief Description 

The Leopold Education Project is part of Pheasants Forever’s educational effort to develop citizens who care about and work to conserve our natural resources. Developed specifically for use with middle school and older students, the mission of the Leopold Education Project is to create an ecologically literate citizenry so that each individual might develop a personal land ethic. 

The Leopold Education Project uses lessons developed to correlate with Aldo Leopold’s book, A Sand County Almanac, which is heralded as one of the most important and influential books in the history of American conservation. Despite its excellence, only a small percentage of teachers, naturalists and interpreters are familiar with the powerful legacy Aldo Leopold gave us. Even fewer use this book and its unique combination of excellent literature and solid science in their educational programs or classrooms.  

"The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education."       -Aldo Leopold

The Leopold Education Project (LEP) was conceived and designed to make this tool available to educators in both formal classroom and informal teaching situations. LEP utilizes hands-on/minds-on activities to combine content knowledge with creative and critical thinking skills to foster a relationship between students and their natural and cultural environments (collectively “the land”). The LEP is an ethics-based program designed to help students in grades 6-12 see the land, understand what they see and enjoy what they understand.  LEP does not advocate particular positions, but rather uses a multidisciplinary approach to promote responsible decision-making and actions regarding our impact on ecosystems. The program is designed to get educators and students outside to understand the world around them and form a “land ethic” from their own experiences. 

The Leopold Education Project (LEP) promotes excellence in conservation education by training educators to utilize this interdisciplinary ethics-based curriculum based on Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac.  Educators interested in facilitating a workshop or using the LEP curriculum materials must attend either a facilitator training or educator in-service workshop presented by LEP trained personnel. To encourage utilization of the curriculum LEP provides a support network including a national staff, state coordinators, the quarterly newsletter Strides, a website www.lep.org, and three types of workshops. 

Educator Workshops provide a full day of hands-on activities that enhance and improve the capacity of educators to make creative use of this unique and powerful educational tool. Participants receive the LEP curriculum and are added to the LEP network. 

Facilitator Workshops expand the training with two-days of activities designed to qualify participants to use the curriculum and provide additional skills to present educator workshops and assist educators with the use of the LEP curriculum materials. In addition to the LEP curriculum participants receive a Facilitator’s Manual full of helpful material to plan and carry out training workshops. 

The LEP Annual National Workshop is a combination of dynamic speakers, hands-on workshops and field tours of the very Sand Counties that inspired Aldo Leopold – including a trip to The Shack. Part conference, part workshop and part reward, this is an inspiring and exciting event for state coordinators, educators and facilitators to gather and exchange experiences regarding their efforts to further a “land ethic”.

The homepage for the Leopold Education Project-http://www.lep.org

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