Gerald A. Lieberman

Over the past thirty years, my work has been focused on school improvement using natural and community surroundings as interdisciplinary contexts. I have created and conducted professional development programs for more than nine thousand educators and other professionals, working with formal education systems at local, state, national, and international levels. Throughout my career, I have designed and coordinated curriculum development programs in the United States, Costa Rica, Honduras, Colombia, and Argentina.

In 1995, I founded and have since directed the State Education and Environment Roundtable (SEER), initially a cooperative endeavor of departments of education in sixteen states sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts for its first ten years and administered by the Council of Chief State School Officers. In 1997, I led the development of the innovative educational strategy called the EIC Model, using a school's local Environment as the Integrating Context for learning. During the past fifteen years, I have focused my work on professional development programs that help schools achieve school improvement goals through implementation of the EIC Model.

From 1993 to 2010, I served as the principal consultant for the State of California’s Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI), a cooperative endeavor of the California Environmental Protection Agency, the California Department of Education, the State Board of Education, the governor’s secretary of education, the Integrated Waste Management Board, and the California Natural Resources Agency. Prior to developing the curriculum, I led the development of the state’s “Environmental Principles and Concepts,” the plan for the EEI curriculum approved by California's State Board of Education in 2010 and now in use by K–12 classrooms throughout California.

My recently released book, Education and the Environment: Creating Standards-based Programs in Schools and Districts, offers key strategies for getting buy-in from school and district administrators, and teachers in connecting nature and the environment into their classroom studies. I was the principal author of Closing the Achievement Gap: Using the Environment as an Integrating Context for Learning, a groundbreaking national study that received an award from the National Environmental Education Foundation for "bringing environmental learning into the mainstream of American K–12 education." Over the years, I have authored forty other major reports, books, and articles on subjects related to environment-based teaching strategies and environmental science.

I received his Ph.D. and M.A. from Princeton University and his BA from UCLA. I served on the executive committee of the National Education and Environment Partnership, operated by the National Environmental Education Foundation, and is a past chair of the Commission on Education and Communication of IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature.