Teaching the teachers

by James Ogilvie – England

Today was another new experience for me, as we spent the afternoon at SD Kandangan III (primary school) Surabaya running a workshop for a group of teachers. We visited this school last week to talk to a group of children, and the children were very excited to see us return to their school.

Yusuke accompanied us again, and we both talked about recycling and water problems in England and Japan and discussed solutions to these problems. We also talked about activities that could be done with the children in school to help them learn about these issues, and how schools in England and Japan approach educating children about the environment.

It was nice to talk to the teachers about these issues, and several of them could speak English reasonably well, so I think they mostly understood what we were trying to say. When we left the school we were followed by choruses of ‘Goodbye Mr James’, but the car wasn’t mobbed by the children as it was last time!!

In the morning, we visited SD St Theresia 1 Surabaya, a school that we had not been to yet. It was one of the nicest schools I have been to so far, and has been nationally recognised for its environmental work for the last three years. It was very clean and tidy, and ran a number of programs to encourage recycling and reduce waste in the school. For example, they do not give out any plastic packaging or straws at the canteen, and they ask the children to bring in plates and cups from home that can be reused. They also have a multitude of different bins for different materials, which all the children used to separate their rubbish so it can be recycled. Measures like these are very simple, yet very effective in teaching the children about recycling.

Again, Yusuke and I spoke to a group of children about recycling and water problems in England and Japan and we discussed solutions to these problems with the children. They were very perceptive to the ideas and seemed very interested in our presentations, especially the photos of things in our countries!