Developing the Education of Wildlife Protection and Nature Conservation With Educators

Education is one of ProFauna main activities to disseminate its wildlife protection campaign to the public in Indonesia. ProFauna has run its education center called Petungsewu Wildlife Education Center (P-WEC) since 2003 and carried out the education activities concerning the protection of wildlife and nature conservation through learning and fun. Students at the center are ranging from kindergarten, university, to other communities or institutions. P-WEC also serves as the advisor of Fauna Club, an extracurricular high school student club learning about wildlife protection and nature conservation in schools in East Java.

For the intra curricular approach, ProFauna gathered 27 teachers from different high schools in Java who concern about wildlife education in a workshop called "Developing Wildlife Education in School" on 24 and 25 July 2009. From this workshop, ProFauna wants to delegate these teachers as 'wildlife education ambassadors' at their own schools to spread the wildlife protection information formally integrated to school subjects, especially biology.

During the workshop, the teachers shared their limitations in teaching wildlife protection and nature conservation. Even though these teachers have concern towards the issues and passion to teach their students, it turned out that the main problems most teachers face were the lack of teaching resources and media. They thought that to teach about wildlife protection and nature conservation needs more space than their schools' yards. ProFauna and the keynote speakers; consisted of experienced conservationist, biologist, teachers and lecturers; suggested that the participants could explore from their closest environment to teach the students about the subject and they should start a communication media between teachers so they could learn from the others. Finding solutions about the best way to teach wildlife education and nature conservation has given more encouragement to the teachers as they have shown their commitment to apply them back at their schools.

ProFauna will keep in communication with these teachers and plans to engage more schools and teachers to hold the same workshop and spread the information about wildlife protection and nature conservation wider.