Teaching new teachers at Foundation University
As part of the educational activities of Marine Conservation Philippines, we are delighted to work with Foundation University, Dumaguete, and collaborate with their National Service Training Program (NSTP). The NSTP is a national program established under RA 9163 for tertiary-level students. The aim of the law is to promote the role of youth in nation-building, and MCP sees this as a great opportunity to build marine awareness among the next generation.
This isn’t our first time working with Foundation University, we previously ran an Oceanography Day with their high school science students, and this NSTP partnership builds on that same relationship at the tertiary level.
NSTP has three components. The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) is a military training and defence-preparedness component for Filipino freshmen. The Civic Welfare Training Service (CWTS) runs community immersion programs, and the Literacy Training Service (LTS) focuses on educating people, including schoolchildren and out-of-school youth, and empowering them through teaching.
So how does this all tie in with the advocacy of Marine Conservation Philippines? Well, MCP partners with the CWTS and LTS programs to teach first-year students and build their skills and knowledge about the marine environment. We created a SEA program, which stands for “Students as Environmental Advocates”. In this program, we train freshman students to talk and teach about marine life, through a variety of field activities.
We focus specifically on freshmen because NSTP is typically completed in a student’s first year, before their coursework narrows toward a particular major. Reaching students at this point means the marine awareness we build in isn’t confined to marine biology or environmental science majors, it reaches future teachers, engineers, business graduates and everyone in between, right at the point where university habits and interests are still taking shape.
The idea is that, through our partnership with elementary schools, these freshman university students get the chance to pass on what they’ve learned from us to schoolchildren. This way, we reach more people in our push for marine awareness, and help turn them into environmental advocates themselves.
Recently, we kicked things off with 300 freshman students at Foundation University, introducing ourselves, what MCP does, and our other conservation engagements around Negros Oriental. Our future engagement with these students includes activities that expose them to the problem of plastic pollution in the country, such as beach clean-ups.
Beyond the activities themselves, this is really an exercise in multiplication. Each cohort of freshmen who pass through the SEA program becomes a fresh set of hands able to carry marine awareness into classrooms we could never reach on our own. It’s the same idea behind all of MCP’s education work: the more local people who can teach this material, the less the reach of marine conservation depends on any one organisation, ours included.
