Mathilde Chanvin
PEN's Lessons Learned Challenge Prize Contest Winner Mathilde Chanvin was awarded $250 USD (with support from Eric Losh Illustration) for her primate education efforts in North Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Read Mathilde's updates from the field below to learn how our support helped her to lead an end of the year event for 200 students, parents, and teachers at the Tasikoki Wildlife Rescue and Education Centre.
PEN’s prize helped to fund Tangkoko Conservation Education's (TCE) end of the year event, which was held in Tasikoki Wildlife Rescue and Education Centre on May 22, 2015. We gathered all the schools that participated in our programme this year and the children passed on their newly acquired knowledge about conservation by delivering original performances through songs, poems, theatre, and drawing exhibitions. The event was also open to our partners and the local community.
TCE’s students participate in a treasure hunt and learn about nature in their local mangrove environment. © Themmy Doaly / Mongabay Indonesia
TCE's event included a treasure hunt called "Tasikoki Cruise". The treasure hunt involved quizzes about Indonesian wildlife and habitat. Our event also included a tree planting session, exhibition about wildlife, live music, and outdoor games. We provided six posters about Sulawesi wildlife (with a focus on crested macaques, the threats they face, and how to protect them) to the new schools participating in our programme. We also printed four standing banners about Sulawesi wildlife for the Education Departments of Bitung, Airmadidi, and Manado municipalities, and the North Sulawesi province.
A student receives the Ecofunopoly game as a reward for being one of the best students of TCE's programme this year! © Tangkoko Conservation Education
We gave 20 games of Ecofunopoly, an original Indonesian board game that introduces children to the environment and teaches them how to become environmentally friendly, to the pupils in our programme who were the most participative and motivated towards wildlife conservation. They can play the game in their communities and at school with their friends.
With PEN’s prize, we were also able to rent three minibuses to bring four classes from one middle school and two primary schools from the remote villages of Winenet and Kasawari to the Tasikoki Wildlife Rescue and Education Centre for our event.
This prize rewards the TCE team, as well as all the volunteers who helped us throughout the year to deliver school interventions. Therefore, we are very happy and honoured to have received it. It has helped us to implement a fabulous event for the pupils involved in the programme and the local community. Hopefully, this event will help them to better understand why it is so important to protect their local environment in a fun and informal way!
Thanks to this prize, we were also able to share lessons learned from our years of experience in delivering awareness campaigns about Sulawesi wildlife. We hope that our lessons learned can help other organisations to conduct similar activities.
Students learn about local plants from TCE. © Themmy Doaly / Mongabay Indonesia
TCE developed an illustrated syllabus of six environmental education lessons for the pupils and school staff participating in our programme. We originally created this syllabus with the help of our partners and a scientific illustrator. The materials are designed to help the teachers integrate the following topics on North Sulawesi wildlife conservation into their daily classroom lesson plans:
- Environmental changes
- Ecosystem and biodiversity of tropical rainforests
- Flora and fauna of Indonesia, Sulawesi, and the forests around us
- Primates, crested macaques (Macaca nigra), and the Macaca Nigra Project
- Trip to Tangkoko: discovering the behaviour of crested macaques
- Characteristics of Indonesian protected areas, status of and threats on Indonesian protected, and endangered wildlife and conservation actions
As a PEN member, TCE would like to share our environmental education lessons in Indonesian for pupils and for teachers!