Zoos As Centres of Conservation Education for Primary School Pupils

Zoos as centres of conservation education for primary school pupils

Dr Sue Dale Tunnicliffe

Homerton College, Cambridge, CB2 2PH

IOSTE 9 Proceedings Volume 2. University of Durban- Westville, Durban, SA, 688-7695 1999

Abstract

If the mission of zoos is to be successful in disseminating information about conservation, it is necessary to know about which topics visitors do spontaneously talk. Should these not be pertinent to conservation, action can be planned and taken which could link the topics which visitors do discuss by themselves to those of importance to the zoo. This paper reviews the results of a project which analysed the content of conversations which were generated by primary school groups in a zoo in England. The project set out to discover the focus of conversations of families and primary school groups at animal exhibits and whether conservation was a topic about which these visitors spontaneously commented Conversations of primary school group and families were recorded and the transcripts analysed according to a systemic network. The resulting data reveal that conservation is not a topic talked about by these visitors. The focus of conversations is on locating the animals; providing a name, which may not be scientifically accurate or correct; commenting upon salient features of anatomy and behaviour, and making interpretative comments relating the animals to humans and other known animals. Furthermore, the conversations contain manifestation of personal and social aspects of conversations inherent within such visits, revealing attitudes and emphasising the important social role which such visits can play for both school and leisure groups. The topics which are discussed by the groups and explanations for their lack of emphasis on conservation are considered. Data suggest that school and family visitors are still establishing their fundamental constituent concepts related to conservation and are around the baseline of the ‘Triangle of hierarchy of conservation concepts’. These visitors are not at the level of conservation understanding and fluency anticipated by the zoo.

Introduction

Zoos are popular places or parents and school teachers to take children particularly those in the primary years, the pre secondary and pre school stage of education. Such visits are mainly social in nature. Both parents (Rosenfield 1980) and schools (Tunnicliffe 1994) cite education as part of he objectives for such visits although the social aspects of such experiences is often to the for of the organisers mind. Indeed, schools do on occasion arrange such visits with social objectives uppermost because the zoo provides a safer place in which pupils can practice their social skills (Tunnicliffe 1994).

Conservation and education are cited by western zoos (Brisbin 1993 ; Brambell 1993; IUDZG and IUCN/SSC 1993) as their main mission. An international survey (Tunnicliffe 1994) conducted amongst school teachers who arranged a field trip to a zoo revealed that, whilst three quarters said conservation was an important aspect of their visit, only 44% cited this as a focus topic and 51% said it was not a theme they would study. Thus, whilst visitors may acknowledge, if questioned, the conservation emphaisis of the work of modern zoos, it is not the focus which visitors adopt when they making their visit. The challenge is therefore to start with the visitors and find out what it is that they respond to whilst looking at animals and develop that interest into developing conservation understanding.

School groups are expected to have a more focused conversational content about animals, their taxonomy and attributes, than family groups because school visits to zoos are undertaken for educational reasons (Marshdoyle, Bowman and Mullins, 1983; Tunnicliffe 1994). One of the functions of zoos is to develop public understanding of biodiversity whose foundations lie in identification of specimens and recognition of criterial attributes. We have to consider the extent to which viewing animals is enabling visitors to attend to these issues and whether the messages explicit within the exhibits reach the visitors and listening to and analysing the unsolicited conversations of visitors is one way to ascertain whether or not this occurs.

Method

It is necessary to find out exactly what the visitors do attend to in order to find a starting point to develop zoos so that they provide opportunities for realistic and effective conservation education strategy. This can most be done by listening to the spontaneous of visitors whilst they are at the enclosure an animal. The project set out to describe and explain ‘what is’ and led to the researcher accounting for what has occurred (Cohen and Manion 1989). I was concerned with providing descriptions of children in their contexts. Details of the methodology for this study can be found elsewhere (Tunnicliffe 1995). Essentially unsolicited conversations were tape-recorded and then analysed according to the categories of a systemic network which had been designed for the study. A systemic network is a type of analysis that changes qualitative into quantifiable data and each topic of conversation was coded according to the systemic network developed from the work of Bliss, Monk and Ogborn (1983). A unit of conversation was defined as the “group conversation in front of any one exhibit from the beginning of the conversation until it ceased”. There were 74 categories in this network.). A bar, '[', indicates that an attribute may be either/or but not a member of both categories, whilst a bracket, '{', indicates one of a number of categories which an animal may have. The total number of conversations collected was 602. The conversations were identified as having mixed gender groups, group of boys only or girls only.

The animal-focused category was divided into six subordinate groups which were interpretative comments; affective comments, which included emotive responses such as ‘Ah!’ or ‘Ugh’ as well as comments about other attitudes - human-animal interactions (and vice versa) and welfare comments; environmental comments referring to the natural habitat or endangered status of the species; comments about the animals’ structure; comments about the animals’ behaviours; comments about the animals’ names.

Figure 1 illustrates the fine-grained coding for ‘body parts’ or anatomical attributes commented upon by the groups and which is one of the most important in terms of taxonomy. After initial analysis it was apparent that the comments were grouped within four super ordinate categories, the front end of the animal, the dimensions (size, colour etc.); features which were unfamiliar to the viewers and included structures such as penises, nipples, horns and claws; and disrupters, the legs and tails of animals which disrupt the outline of the animals’ shape (Tunnicliffe 1996).

Each conversation unit was categorised with the appropriate number from the networks. An example is provided below. The conversations occurred in the Reptile House at London Zoo.

71/20/ 71/20 /71 /20/

Boy 1: There's one and there's one and there's one.

50/ 74/ 55/ 40/ 20/ 16/ 71

Boy 2: Two. See that buffalo skull over there? That's from America and there's

17

a light bulb too.

Figure 1 The main network used in the analysis (Further details in Tunnicliffe 1995)

Results

A total of 602 conversations were collected and analysed. Of these 459 were of schol groups whose age distribution is shown in Table 1. These groups were not accompanied by zoo staff but by teachers, helpers from school or were alone.

Table 1 Age group of shool parties

Table 2 shows the distribution of the conversations of school groups according to the gender of the group members.

Table 2

Distribution of the conversations of school groups according to gender of the group members

The content of the conversations that were generated at London Zoo by primary school groups and family groups is shown in Table 3 and 4. The only significant differences (p< 0.005) are the numbers of exhibit access, affective and emotive attitude comments.

Table 3

The content of conversations of the school groups compared with that of the family groups at London zoo.

a In this table, the data refer to conversations that contain at least one comment in a given category. The categories are not mutually exclusive and hence the total of all the percentages in sub-categories may, and do, exceed 100%.

b Not applicable. The expected values of each cell in a 2 x 2 table should be 10 or more. One of the cells in the table was not, therefore the chi square value can not be calculated.

The many similarities in the content of the conversations are striking and unexpected because of the different rationales for the visit -the school visits are for educational purpose and the family for social and leisure objectives. School groups generated significantly more affective attitudes including emotive ones. However, families may ‘bond’ in another emotional sense because they collaboratively search and located animals in exhibits.

The results shown in Table 3 suggest that the formal educational experience of school groups in the zoo are emotionally rich. Rosenfeld (1980:77) after studying family groups, concluded that a formal classroom lesson (in school) is ‘information-rich, experience-poor’ in direct contrast to the family experience in a zoo- ‘information poor, experience rich’. School groups did not talk about finding the animals as much as did

families. In all other categories there were no significant differences in the conversational content. The data in Table 4 show that both groups, families and schools, shared a similar focus of comments about the animals and emphasises the commonality of the conversational content of the two groups. School groups say more emotive comments than do families (Tunnicliffe, 1996b). Neither group mentioned conservation topics.

Table 4

A Comparison of the number of conversations that contained at least one comment of a category that were made by primary school and family groups at live animals viewed at London Zoo.

*p<0.01

a In this table, the data refer to conversations that contain at least one comment in a given category. The categories are not mutually exclusive and hence the total of all the percentages in sub-categories may, and do, exceed 100%.

b These were comments where group members referred to the source of their knowledge and were predominantly personal using statements of the kind ‘I think that...’, ‘I know that....’ or asking questions of others. References to books, displays, and other sources of information were rare.

c Comments in this category were ones which questioned or discussed whether the animal was real and alive. Such comments were most common with sleeping animals such as the crocodiles.

d Not applicable. The expected values of each cell in a 2 x 2 table should be 10 or more. One of the cells in the table was not, therefore the chi square value can not be calculated.

Table 4 compares the content of animal focused conversations that were generated by these two separate groups and shows a similar shared pattern, except that family groups compared the animals significantly more. The comparisons were either with another animal, with humans or with artefacts such as a toy. The data obtained from the conversations generated at the live animals by school groups of boys-only or girls-only are remarkably similar. However, boys named animals in some way more often but girl- only groups expressed emotive attitudes in more conversational exchanges and commented significantly more about observed behaviours.

Table 5 shows the remarkable consistency in comments generated in the three main categories of animal observations, anatomy or body parts, behaviour and naming. Whilst individual categories have yielded no significant difference within the naming super ordinate category the accumulative results shows that girl-only groups refer to names less than do boy-only groups.

Table 5

Comparison of in conversations in Zoos of Subordinate gender categories- of School Groups - animal observations

The data on conservation were so few in number that they do not appeer in the table.