The Association for Experiential Education, or AEE, is a

nonprofit A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

, professional membership association that promotes experiential education. Currently based in

St. Petersburg, Florida St. Petersburg is a city in Pinellas County, Florida, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 258,308, making it the fifth-most populous city in Florida and the second-largest city in the Tampa Bay Area, after Tampa. It is the ...

, USA, it was founded in the early 1970s in

Boone, North Carolina Boone is a town in and the county seat of Watauga County, North Carolina, United States. Located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, Boone is the home of Appalachian State University and the headquarters for the disaster a ...

by a group of educators who believed that the core of learning is enhanced by experiential forms of education.

Membership

AEE members have affiliations in education, recreation, outdoor and adventure programming, the environment, mental health, youth development, programming for people with disabilities, service learning, and organizational development. Professionals, organizations, and students who share the mission and vision of AEE join to benefit from and contribute to the network of resources championing experiential education. This includes the publication of an academic journal, as well as regional and international conferences.

Publications

The association publishes the ''

Journal of Experiential Education The ''Journal of Experiential Education'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering the field of experiential education. The editor-in-chief is Jayson Seaman (University of New Hampshire). It was established in 1978 and is published ...

'' in collaboration with

Sage Publications SAGE Publishing, formerly SAGE Publications, is an American independent publishing company founded in 1965 in New York by Sara Miller McCune and now based in Newbury Park, California. It publishes more than 1,000 journals, more than 800 books ...

Conferences

AEE hosts eight regional conferences and one international conference annually, which jointly serve more than 1,800 attendees with hundreds of workshops, prominent speakers, continuing education units, regional and networking opportunities, and entertainment. Educators, practitioners and students from around the world come together at these events with the goal of developing professionally, and promoting, defining, and applying the theories and practices of experiential education.

Accreditation

After a rapid increase in the number of adventure programs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the need for standards of program quality, professional behavior, and appropriate risk management became imperative. In 1994, AEE responded to that need by developing the most comprehensive standards for common practices in the adventure education industry, becoming the nation's first recognized accreditation process focusing on adventure education programming. Since then, the AEE Accreditation Program's standards-based evaluation process by objective, independent reviewers has become the industry-accepted level of professional evaluation for adventure programs. AEE recently added an accreditation program focusing on Outdoor Behavioral Healthcare.

Awards

Among other awards, AEE has presented the

Karl Rohnke Karl Rohnke (1937-2020) is a key figure in the development of adventure education, and was instrumental in the creation of Project Adventure in the early 1970s. Biography After graduating from Washington & Lee University in 1960, Rohnke was draf ...

Creativity Award since 1997.

Past recipients

* 1997 – Sandy Carlson * 1998 – Mobile Team Challenge * 1999 – Jim Cain * 2000 – Sam Sikes * 2001 – Rufus Collinson * 2003 – Thomas A. Shearer * 2005 – Tom Smith * 2006 – Clifford Knapp * 2007 – TA Loeffler * 2008 – Chris Cavert * 2009 – Brent Bell * 2010 – Kim Wasserburger * 2011 – Maurie Lung * 2012 – Marilyn Levin * 2014 – Madhu Sudan * 2015 – Gary Stauffer * 2016 – Amy Climer * 2017 – Michelle Cummings * 2018 – Jude Hirsch * 2019 – Seth C. Hawkins

o award given in 2002, 2004, and 2013 O, or o, is the fifteenth Letter (alphabet), letter and the fourth vowel letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in ...

References

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External links

Association for Experiential Education

Association for Experiential Education Accreditation Program

The Challenge - a social networking community for adventure-based experiential learning practitioners.
Non-profit organizations based in Colorado Outdoor education organizations Educational organizations based in the United States