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Wildlife Conservation Course 2017 – Conservation Heroes – featured in New Straits Times, Malaysia

Threats of habitat loss, climate change and overexploitation create havoc in the world as the new Conservation Heroes emerge and battle against these evil forces. These heroes have acquired their special powers from the two-week intensive Wildlife Conservation Course taught using innovative techniques from role-play to games to theatre.

The Wildlife Conservation Course, third year in its running, was featured in the New Straits Times, Malaysia’s longest running newspaper (read the full article here). This WildCRU course, supported by Panthera, not only taught students how to be better conservationists and communicators, there was also research on the teaching methods. These findings would in turn help understand whether new approaches in environmental education are beneficial to both the conservationist and the public.

Other than the positive reviews from the 2017 students, the newspaper article also featured Sheherazade Jayadi, one of 2016 participants. She is collaborating with the course director (Cedric Tan), on her new game on flying foxes in Indonesia. She said that this creative way of outreach made the children in the Banggal community “very happy” and “keen to participate”.

After this course, Cedric was invited to Xishuangbanna, China, for the second time this year to give a four-day workshop on Innovative Education in Conservation. He has several on-going projects with the previous students in Southeast Asia and China on innovative outreach and its research.

“Both course were a huge success! Students went away excited, inspired and feeling competent about their newly found skills. We hope to continue the Wildlife Conservation course as an annual event at the University of Nottingham Malaysia campus. Next year’s theme might be Harry Potter.” said Cedric with the smile of a Slytherin.