Rie Akami, Japan Monkey Centre, Japan
North & East Asia
Collaboration between zoos and schools is important in promoting conservation education. Although field trips can be effective, for more continuous learning, it would be better to integrate conservation education into school curriculums. Compared to general visitors, school visitors are: 1) young generation who will carry the future, 2) involving all students of the class (even if they dislike animals), and 3) expected to create a good social norm in the classes and to change their behaviors. Every year, we have over 10,000 students from about 200 schools at Japan Monkey Centre (JMC). To estimate the possibility of the integration, we conducted a questionnaire for teachers about the implementations or plans of school subjects and other activities related to wildlife conservation. 174 answers collected from April 2019 to November 2019 were analyzed. 30% of the teachers answered that they had some implementations related to wildlife conservation. 7% of them answered they had a plan or hope related to wildlife conservation. The teaching related to wildlife conservation was integrated in subjects such as “Science”, “Social studies”, “Integrated learning time”, “Language”, and “Moral Education”. In "Science", "Social Studies", and "Moral education", some units of the subject included content that can be related to wildlife conservation. In the "Language", topics related to wild animals were presented in the reading materials. There is ample potential to integrate conservation education into the school curriculum by collaboration with zoo education. In this presentation, I would like to show examples from Japanese textbooks and those provided by teachers.
Speaker Biography
2005-Now : Curator of Japan Monkey Centre. Working for Zoo Education. My research subjects are Visitor’s perception of primates, Zoo and Scholl collaboration, Development of new educational programs.
2002-2005 : Industry-academia-government collaborative researcher of Graduate School of Agricultural and life Science / Faculty of Agriculture, The University of Tokyo.
Worked for constructing the pedigree chart of all Great Apes kept in Japan : Great Apes Information Network (https://shigen.nig.ac.jp/gain/top.jsp).