“It’s Human Education”: Why Tashanda Giles-Jones Has Been Bringing Students to NatureBridge for a Decade
For Tashanda Gilies-Jones, hands-on activities are at the heart of an education that leads to true understanding and transformation.
Tashanda arrived as a classroom teacher at Environmental Charter Schools (ECS) in South Los Angeles, CA where she first taught the Green Ambassador program before becoming the district’s Environmental Program Specialist. Today, she oversees environmental partnerships and outdoor learning opportunities for students across ECS’s four schools.
Her first career was in medicine, but she found herself increasingly drawn to questions about how people make choices and what elements contribute to lasting behavior change. After studying public policy and working at the intersection of sustainability and access issues, she discovered that environmental education offered a powerful avenue for young people to connect to nature and learn about themselves.
In 2014, Tashanda chaperoned an ECS seventh-grade trip to NatureBridge’s Southern California campus in the Santa Monica Mountains. More than ten years later, she’s still bringing students back to experience NatureBridge programs.
During her first NatureBridge trip, Tashanda remembers her students photographing wildflowers in a meadow, discovering salamanders as they crawled through caves, and hiking through the rain toward a mountaintop overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As the trail grew steeper and muddier, only a handful of students wanted to finish the climb. Tashanda encouraged them, committing herself to completing the hike to the top with them.
“I kept asking them, ‘When will you ever do this again?’” she recalls. “Crawl through a cloud to get to a mountaintop and see the ocean?”
Tashanda’s experience on that misty mountain trail crystallized a belief she’d already been developing: some lessons simply can’t be taught inside a classroom. “It’s educational literacy,” she emphasizes. “It’s human education. It’s human knowledge.”
Environmental education, and outdoor education in particular, is one of those topics you can teach and get the same impact, outcomes, and reactions from an 18-year-old or a five-year-old or an adult.Tashanda Giles-Jones, Environmental Program Specialist
At ECS, outdoor education is woven into the academic curriculum, offering students new opportunities every year to apply classroom science “in real life,” collaborate with classmates, and build confidence through new experiences. The programs and the impacts are cumulative. In student reflections, Tashanda identifies recurring themes of belonging, resilience, and pride. Many students report feeling more willing to step outside their comfort zones—not only outdoors, but back in the classroom as well.
She also sees something deeper: students beginning to visualize themselves in places where they may not have previously felt they belonged.
“Seeing themselves in these outdoor spaces, seeing others who look like them in those spaces” is so important, Tashanda points out. Expanded student access leads to expanded representation, and it offers opportunities to confront “cultural narratives of where you do or don’t belong and begin unpacking them.” For young people, experiences in nature lead to more expansive images of their futures.
Getting kids into the outdoors leads to them becoming adults who make choices that are environmentally-conscious and sustainable.Tashanda Giles-Jones, environmental program specialist and educator
Looking ahead, Tashanda is encouraged by California’s growing legislative support for environmental education. She believes that the state’s emerging outdoor education bill “affirms something I have always known—that this is deeply important.” To Tashanda, passage of the upcoming legislation represents increased funding, accessibility, the ability to develop deeper partnerships, and the opportunity to dream bigger about what outdoor education can look like for young people and their future. “Anybody reading this, dial in,” she advises. “When that law comes out, support it! Celebrate it and start dreaming and planning on how to do this more and better.”
After over a decade of partnering with NatureBridge, Tashanda remains convinced that outdoor education isn’t “an extra”—it’s an essential part of helping young people discover and understand themselves, each other, and the world they will help shape.
Editor’s note: Tashanda was the Featured Teacher Speaker at An Evening with NatureBridge on May 7, 2026. You can watch her speech from the event here.
Stories
“It’s Human Education”: Why Tashanda Giles-Jones Has Been Bringing Students to NatureBridge for a Decade
For Tashanda Gilies-Jones, hands-on activities are at the heart of an education that leads to true understanding and transformation. In 2014, Tashanda chaperoned an ECS seventh-grade trip to NatureBridge’s Southern California campus in the Santa Monica Mountains. More than ten years later, she’s still bringing students back to experience NatureBridge programs.
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Alicia Bales, current Director of the Redwood Chapter of the Sierra Club, didn’t grow up seeing herself as an outdoorsy person. Raised in Sacramento, CA, she thought of herself as a “city kid” who had spent little time in nature—until a school trip to NatureBridge Yosemite changed everything.
Growing Educators, Growing Impact: Kerri McAllister’s Journey from NatureBridge to National Geographic
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