Palingbeek is looking for an educational employee in nature and environmental education through secondment.

Are you a motivated teacher and ready for a new challenge?
For the provincial visitor center Palingbeek (Zillebeke - Ypres) we are looking for a full-time educational employee in nature and environmental education via secondment (leave due to assignment).

Your position
In short: as an educational employee, together with the rest of the team, you create an experience-rich program about and in nature – NMEDO – for both education and the general public. You do this on a project basis, ranging from consultation, scripts, purchases and management of materials to writing texts for promotion and forms of guides.

The education target group receives a large share of your time, but you also work towards a broad audience.

Education: On the one hand, you monitor the practical operation of our Kemmelberg hub and other nature reserves in the region, ranging from following up on partnerships, making practical agreements to monitoring the correctness of the material and knowing the needs of the participating schools. An administrative employee takes care of the reservations. Together you ensure that school visits run smoothly.
You are also substantively responsible for part of the existing offering, for which you ensure quality control, provide guides with feedback or make improvements. To promote the offer, you provide stimulating texts that create the right expectations. You maintain contact with and coach the supervisors of this offer. Together with your colleagues, you map out a path to further train and appreciate them.
You develop new offerings for primary education class groups. You have an eye for innovation, opportunities, pitfalls, educational goals, timing and budget. You have insight into which themes and methods offer added value for a class group to visit. These new actions are determined annually based on an objectives framework together with the team.

Broad audience: You use your expertise around the world of children aged 3-12 years to reach the general public, for example by developing children's activities or family quests. You actively look for fun and innovative methods that find their place during events and summer programming, among other things.

The organisation
The Province of West Flanders adds an extra layer of nature experience to the provincial domains with its six provincial NME centres. This offer brings young and old into this beautiful nature and lets them experience how fun, healthy and important nature is. It leads to more involvement, respect and nature- and environmentally friendly actions.

We are responsible for this range from development to repeated high-quality implementation, whether or not in collaboration with partners and external parties. We do not supervise groups and activities ourselves, but are provided by our own group of supervisors (as volunteers or self-employed) and partner organizations.

In addition to the wealth of fauna and flora in the Palingbeek provincial domain, numerous British cemeteries and bomb craters remind us of the war past. Not to mention the historical failure of the Oude Vaart, the starting point of this beautiful piece of nature.

The unique collection of diverse biotopes brings together an immense variety of animals. The Palingbeek Visitor Center takes up the challenge of making the world of many of these animals visible. In this way, people learn to know, appreciate and protect these animals, their special properties and their environment. In this context, a new experiential project is being started: a sensory discovery tour through nature past original installations to see or get to know animals or their tracks better.

Our offer is aimed at individual visitors who visit the Ranger hut on their own or go on an adventurous quest, schools who are immersed in a chosen theme under the guidance of a guide, groups who experience all kinds of things with a guide or visitors who go through participating in a series of events, activities and workshops throughout the year. This always revolves around nature, environment & sustainable development (NMEDO) and heritage in an active, adventurous way. The goal is to amaze, a different view or new knowledge.

The education offered takes place in the Palingbeek provincial domain (Ypres), the Kemmelberg provincial domain (Heuvelland), some forests in the Ypres region and surrounding areas, as well as in and around the Blankaart nature reserve (Diksmuide). The offer for the general public, on the other hand, focuses purely on Palingbeek.