Environmental education in its infancy at Lake Alaotra, Madagascar

Reibelt, Lena M.; Richter, Torsten; Waeber, Patrick O.; Rakotoarimanana, Sandanionja; Mantilla-Contreras, Jasmin

doi:10.4314/mcd.v9i2.3

Cited by 19 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 53 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…We had a control class without environmental education and an intervention class per school to control for within-school differences. In the Alaotra region, the class teachers teach all school subjects in their classes, so there could be no bias due to other teacher's influence [6]. Since environmental education is not part of the Malagasy school curricula, students in control classes received instructions as usual.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given the amount of effort invested in environmental education in developing countries, with few exceptions, there is a general lack of quality empirical studies on the outcomes and effectiveness of environmental education in general [62][63][64], the more so for Africa [65][66][67][68][69][70][71] and especially, Madagascar [6,23,58,72,73]. This may be a side effect of the current situation that almost all environmental education is provided by NGOs and undertaken by practitioners not trained in evaluation techniques, their donors normally financing only practical educational work and not time-consuming and costly scientific evaluation [74].…”

Section: Education and Environmental Education In Madagascarmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Environmental education and lessons on Madagascar's biodiversity and lemurs have only been integrated marginally in official school curricula so far, despite decades of lobbying by various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and concerned scientists [6,56]. As a consequence, there is only limited and irregular environmental education and education on biodiversity in schools.…”

Section: Education and Environmental Education In Madagascarmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This translates to the education system. Children from well-off families attend privately funded quality schools, leaving the majority of school children to overcrowded and underfunded schools financed by the state [5,6]. Madagascar has a fast growing population of ~23 million with a growth rate of ~2.6% per year (ranked 25 out of 233 states), a birth rate of 3.3% (ranked 33 out of 233 states), a low median age of 18.72 years and a high mean adolescent birth rate of ~146 out of 1000 (women giving birth in the age range 15-19 years) for the last 25 years [2,7].…”

Section: Madagascar Lake Alaotra and Its Marshlandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An increasing number of teachers are paid by local communities themselves because the state fails to pay the salaries. Teachers increasingly have to work in a second position or in subsistence farming to make ends meet [6,23]. On average, each teacher has to school 43 students [2].…”

Section: Education and Environmental Education In Madagascarmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Conservation Messages in Speech Bubbles–Evaluation of an Environmental Education Comic Distributed in Elementary Schools in Madagascar

Richter

Rendigs

Maminirina³

2015

Sustainability

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract:In this paper, we present the results of a survey of an environmental education program applied to a cohort of 542 students in six primary schools at Lake Alaotra, Madagascar. The educational materials used were a comic book and additional materials designed specifically for local conditions in rural Madagascar. The comic book conveyed mostly system knowledge and, to a lesser extent, action-related knowledge. The additional materials posed practical tasks to students and were meant to stimulate teamwork and group discussion of students. There was a control and two treatment groups. A questionnaire was applied to test students' environmental knowledge at three different points in time. The survey showed a significant increase in environmental knowledge of students receiving environmental education compared to controls. This effect significantly increased with additional education materials fostering peer-to-peer learning by students instead of when teacher-centred learning was provided. Students that used those materials also had the highest scores in tests one year after environmental education ended, thus indicating the usefulness of innovative and locally meaningful materials in environmental education. OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2015, 7 8856

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Education and Environmental Education In Madagascarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Education and Environmental Education In Madagascarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Madagascar Lake Alaotra and Its Marshlandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Education and Environmental Education In Madagascarmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Conservation Messages in Speech Bubbles–Evaluation of an Environmental Education Comic Distributed in Elementary Schools in Madagascar

Richter

Rendigs

Maminirina³

2015

Sustainability

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Nine years of the Red Book Challenge conservation education in Southern Madagascar: What we have learned

Walker-Bolton¹

2022

American J Primatol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Red Book Challenge Conservation Education Madagascar is a small-scale, arts-based, conservation education initiative founded in 2012 by two Lemur catta researchers working in the Berenty Reserve and incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 2022. The target demographic is children and adults living in Southern Madagascar. The Red Book Challenge program initially consisted of providing supplementary conservation education through classroom visits at the elementary schools in Berenty village. The school children created small conservation booklets with red covers, giving the project its name. Today, the program has expanded to include the village of Besakoa Ambany and the city of Fort Dauphin, while remaining a smallscale program. To date, the Red Book Challenge has completed seven outreach projects aimed at generating goodwill in the local community, community development, and conservation education. This retrospective analysis functions as a formative evaluation of the feasibility of future projects. This paper will focus on four projects that fall under the category of conservation education: (1) Using films to promote conservation topics (2) field trips to observe lemurs (3) a Malagasy-run conservation club, and (4) a coloring book. These projects have been funded through small grants from the International Conservation Fund of Canada, and private donations. This paper includes the Red Book Challenge's history, results from the participant surveys, and the successes and failures in each stage of our work. Six shifts in thinking occurred: (1) use of Malagasy talent to create educational conservation films (2) more formal assessment before and after field trips (3) improvement of recruitment, training and supervision of staff to keep the conservation club self-sufficient (4) enlistment of Malagasy illustrators and adaptation of environmentally friendly printing practices for the coloring books (5) disseminate study outcomes to international community though publication (6) reframe the program from spare-time volunteer work to full-time research work.

show abstract

Evaluating the impact of environmental education around Ranomafana National Park

Razafindravony

Donohue

Docherty

et al. 2023

American J Primatol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A total of 94% of lemur species are currently threatened with extinction and more than 17 species of giant lemur are already extinct. To help prevent the extinction of Madagascar's remaining lemurs, Dr. Patricia Wright initiated conservation programs in the Ranomafana region of southern Madagascar in the 1990s. These continued and expanded, and in 2003 were consolidated with Dr. Wright's research activities when Center ValBio (“CVB”) was founded in 2003. CVB believes in the “One Health” approach in understanding the relationship between humans and the environment, and one of their core principles is that effective conservation is science‐based. CVB's environmental education (EE) programs (discussed herein) operate in various primary schools surrounding Ranomafana national park (RNP). The all‐Malagasy team consists of long‐term conservation educators as well as young intern teachers, who together address the issues of valuing lemurs and the forests that they require to survive. In this paper, we will describe three of CVB's EE programs and evaluate their impact. The primary tool used to assess impact was an analysis of pre‐ and post ‐intervention test scores evaluated using a Kruskal–Wallis test. We show that these programs (1) are popular, (2) produce concrete outputs that can change rural villages, and (3) improve local knowledge on the importance of biodiversity and sustainable development.

show abstract

Environmental education in its infancy at Lake Alaotra, Madagascar

Abstract: Madagascar is renowned for its unique biodiversity but also for the continuous degradation of its natural environment and its high poverty rate. In order to achieve sustainable development, environmental education has been assigned a key role. In

Cited by 19 publications

References 53 publications

Conservation Messages in Speech Bubbles–Evaluation of an Environmental Education Comic Distributed in Elementary Schools in Madagascar

Conservation Messages in Speech Bubbles–Evaluation of an Environmental Education Comic Distributed in Elementary Schools in Madagascar

Nine years of the Red Book Challenge conservation education in Southern Madagascar: What we have learned

Evaluating the impact of environmental education around Ranomafana National Park

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About