Last weekend, our Education Officer Susan “attended” the International Conservation Education Conference, run jointly by the International Zoo Educators Association and the European Association for Zoos and Aquariums.

Usually this bi-annual conference takes place at a collection somewhere around the globe, rotating across the continents every time. But with travel still restricted in many countries, the decision was made for this years conference to go virtual. 294 delegates from 55 countries joined in over the course of the weekend!

Hosted by Zoo Wroclaw and Afrykarium in Poland, with support from San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, the event started at 7am UK time on Friday and finished at 5.30pm on Sunday! Thankfully, the whole event was recorded, so participants were able to get on with work, life and catch up on sleep if required!

The theme of this years conference was Building Conservation Education Success and featured 65 talks, workshops and presentations on a variety of topics.

Covid was a big feature of many of the sessions, particularly how collections adapted from teaching in person to teaching virtually, something we have already embraced, but are always keen to learn how to improve our offer. In particular, using more interactive technology through quizzes, virtual reality and props to really keep the audience engaged.

Not all the presentations were by current educators, with several students presenting their research on nature connections, diversity and learning context modelling. Some of these studies will be influencing our work going forwards and it was refreshing to see studies being done looking at the evaluation of learning (both formal and informal) in collections.

Susan said “I’ve always loved finding out what other collections are doing and sharing ideas on how to improve our work. Although our work focusses on birds of prey, I particularly enjoyed finding out about the use of smell libraries at a Russian collection working with bears, community engagement projects from an aquarium in Ireland and nature pre-school from a Zoo in the USA. It was also great to reconnect with fellow Educators in the UK, and I hope to visit some collections in person over the coming months to see for myself the amazing work that we are all doing for conservation education.”