The Houston Zoo's very own ZooMobile!
As the month of February ended and Spring Break came near, the Education Department’s schedule filled up very quickly. It’s spring which means lots of school fieldtrips and lots of ZooMobile program requests. As an Education Specialist at the Zoo, in a 5-day week you may do 4 ZooMobiles (each could be about 5 hours long including drive time), 3 Adventure Classes and even Safari School! Phew! It makes me tired just thinking about it, but we do it because we love it, and we know that educating children about the critical nature of our earth, wildlife and natural resources is imperative. Some programs are smoother than others, sometimes things just don’t seem to go your way but you deliver the best program you can because you know the kids deserve it.
On one occasion at the end of March of this year I went on one of the most rewarding ZooMobiles I have ever been on. It was a Tuesday and I remember packing up biofacts with one of our docents, Marcia. We discussed which bird skulls to take, which cat furs and which mammal claws to pack up. It was like any other Zoomobile until we got in the van. Marcia began to tell me how this elementary school came upon having the Zoo out to their school.
She told me that the school we were traveling to is where her daughter is a lead teacher. Well, I thought, this will be great! We will have a teacher that we know to control behavior so we can focus on the teaching…but that wasn’t all. Marcia’s daughter is a lead teacher in a school made up of mostly refugees from around the world. From Ethiopia to Iran and Venezuela, there were students who came from all walks of life with very different backgrounds, and some with very sad pasts. As well as having a school made up of mostly refugees, Marcia told me that most classes were barely learning English. This, I thought, was not out of the ordinary for the Houston area, except that their native languages weren’t necessarily Spanish. Similar to the areas where they were born, their native languages spanned from Portugese to Korean and Chinese. My language skills extend to Spanish, and only short phrases in French and Japanese…at this point I wasn’t sure if the kids would enjoy themselves at all if they couldn’t understand a word we were saying!
To my surprise, and completely to the contrary of what I had expected, the kids loved the presentations. We improvised in Spanish; we made arm gestures and acted out scenes of birds, mammals and reptiles. We touched furs and skulls and live animals and tried to explain the rest. What didn’t come across in words certainly came out in smiles, movements and sounds. It turns out the ZooMobile can be so much more than an hour long presentation about animals. Animals and an appreciation of wildlife can transcend from any language and any culture, anywhere.
Not only did the kids enjoy themselves, but they earned it. Unable to pay for the ZooMobile presentations on their own, teachers from their school applied for a grant in order to award their hard-working students with a visit from the Zoo. The grant paid off for the kids, and the experience paid off for me. It doesn’t get much better than that!
Written by Martha, Education Programs Specialist
