Association for Experiential Education

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines for companies and organizations. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources: "Association for Experiential Education" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources. Find sources: "Association for Experiential Education" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The Association for Experiential Education, or AEE, is a nonprofit, professional membership association that promotes experiential education.^[1] Currently based in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, it was founded in the early 1970s in Boone, North Carolina by a group of educators who believed that the core of learning is enhanced by experiential forms of education.

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.

The association publishes the Journal of Experiential Education in collaboration with SAGE Publications.^[2]

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.^[3] 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.

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.

Among other awards, AEE has presented the Karl Rohnke Creativity Award since 1997.^[4]

• 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

[No award given in 2002, 2004, and 2013]

• Adventure education
• Adventure therapy
• Experiential education
• Outdoor education

• Association for Experiential Education
• Association for Experiential Education Accreditation Program
• The Challenge - a social networking community for adventure-based experiential learning practitioners.