Last week the PACE Conservation Educators Learning Circle held its latest on-line meeting. Palloma Pachiti, one of our team in Zimbabwe, prepared a session for educators in South Africa, very much based on ideas and techniques that had particularly resonated with kids club leaders at a training with RWCA in Kigali recently. It was great to be sharing learning and successes, that’s what PACE is all about after all – a Pan African Conservation Education !
The RWCA – Rwanda Wildlife Conservation Association – mentors work with a lot of younger children, many of whom are only just starting to learn English, and are still building their basic reading and writing skills. One of their concerns has been that while PACE is very much relevant to younger kids, they fear the content may not be accessible to them when kids are handling the books themselves, because the language is too high. As well as being all about practical, PACE materials are however, intentionally, very visual. Africa our Home uses watercolour paintings and the new booklets are bursting with bright, clear, high quality photos illustrating each section.
Palloma had the mentors ‘reading the pictures’ in the vulture, pangolin and mountain gorilla booklets, describing what they saw, and then going back to look again, at the same images, to find more information, to compare and find more detail. All without reading a single word! They quickly realised the value of picture talk, for learners, and also for themselves as educators. Kids like to discover things, they like to explore, they like pictures, love animals, and by talking about what they see they build language skills!
Another concern expressed by the mentors was not having enough subject matter knowledge to answer all the kids questions. They have been teaching children the PACE content, but often feel out of their depth when they don’t have answers to all the children’s questions. Palloma demonstrated that by considering themselves as facilitators, prompting and guiding the kids as they explore and look through resources, discovering for themselves, rather than listening to a lecture, takes the pressure off the teacher. It was also somehow a pleasure, to reassure these youth leaders, that a) nobody knows all the answers and b) to have kids full of curiosity and comfortable to ask questions was a credit to their own leadership skills. Many problems solved. Thank you Palloma!
We were particularly pleased that the Learning Circle last week enabled us to share some of these ideas with Clarence and Phillipine from VulPro in South Africa, building on a mentoring visit from Palloma in January. Phillipine started as an intern with VulPro early this year. She is based in Blouberg Nature Reserve, in the north of the country, a protected area and site of important vulture colonies that VulPro is working hard to protect. Phillipine works with schools and teachers, giving presentations and running sessions to build Vulture and wider wildlife and conservation values in the area. Palloma had the VulPro educators explore digital versions of the PACE resources, and think about how they can break them down into a series of short presentations to use as a framework for sessions with their younger groups. Phillipine was tasked to create some examples, which we’ll build on in our next Learning Circle meets. Looking forward to having comment and input from educators in our other projects. PACE – Pan African Conservation Education !!
