Burke Honored as Outstanding Educator

EENC Board Member Elizabeth Burke, honored as Project Learning Tree Virginia's 2009 Outstanding Educator of the Year, pictured with four of her students at Meadowlark Botanical Gardens in Vienna, Virginia

Project Learning Tree's Virginia Coordinate, Lisa Deaton, writes:

Elizabeth has been instrumental in enriching the learning environmental at Vienna's Wolftrap Elementary School by organizing HOWL -- Helping Our World by Learning. She worked with the Wolftrap administration and teachers to ensure that the enrichment program connects to state standards. Using PLT, she trains parents to be classroom docents and conducts PLT workshops for local area teachers. She also involves Scout groups in service projects on school grounds. In her encounters with other schoolyard garden coordinators, she has been an advocate of having PLT as part of HOWL and Wolftrap's gardening efforts. Aside from being a PLT facilitator, she is a Virginia Master Naturalist and a certified environmental Educator in North Carolina. As a non-formal educator/consultant with Mud Pie Planet, she writes curricula for a number of organizations, including the National Park Service.