Audio Story Assignment: The Environmental Equity Podcast

Before I ever thought about environmental education as an equity issue, I experienced it as an opportunity to be curious.

During college, I worked as an educator at a children’s science museum where I helped young people engage with science and the natural world through hands-on learning. I watched kids hold animals, investigate scientific questions, and discover something about the world around them for the very first time. Those experiences helped shaped one of the central questions behind my Environmental Equity Project: Who gets access to environmental education in the first place?

For my final audio story, I wanted to bring that question back to where my own environmental education began: California’s rural Central Valley.

I spoke with Vicky Armstrong, a retired curriculum director for a rural Central Valley school district who now works as an education consultant and mentor. She also happens to be my mom and, long before I started thinking about environmental equity, she was my very first environmental educator.

Growing up, she helped foster my curiosity about nature and encouraged me to pay attention to the world around me. That made her an especially meaningful person to talk with about the role schools and educators can play in giving young people similar opportunities to build a relationship with the natural world.

Our conversation explores what environmental education can look like in rural schools, some of the barriers educators face in providing those experiences, and why giving students opportunities to learn about and experience nature matters. For me, the conversation also connects the much larger issue of environmental equity to something personal. Access to nature and environmental learning can help shape whether someone feels connected to the environment and, eventually, whether they feel invested in protecting it themselves.

From recording to the final product:

Creating the audio story was an exercise in learning a new way of storytelling.

I work professionally as a journalist, so I am used to conducting interviews and thinking about the structure of a story. But, with audio, I thought differently about how a story sounds instead of relying on the written word.

My initial draft focused primarily on getting the core pieces in place. Upon listening back to the first version, I realized there were places I should edit out filler words and even add music. Using royalty free music on Soundcloud, I added intro and outro music that made it feel more cohesively like a podcast you might hear on your local NPR station.