From the Comfort Zone to the Twilight Zone

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Originally appears in the Summer 2021 issue.

By Kevin Frailey

Imagine teaching 4^th-grade science and your principal informs you that starting Monday, you will be teaching English Literature at the high school. Perhaps you conduct live bird-of-prey programs for a nature center, but the center director asks you to focus on traveling to schools with a new 3D groundwater model instead. Both formal and nonformal educators are used to some change or shifting in their jobs, but COVID-19 created a cataclysmic adjustment for some. 

This is a story about a team of 15 educators in a nonformal education setting who were encouraged to do a virtual 180-degree flip from their comfort zone to the twilight zone, moving from the familiar to the unknown. The most amazing thing is that after a period of six months, their caution turned to confidence and their enmity to embracement.

Once upon a time, there were 11 state park employees, often referred to as naturalists or “nature educators” by some. In this broad field of environmental education, the work they do goes by many names: interpretation, outdoor education, and conservation education.