Take 6 different groups of young people and put them on a beach with a TV crew and what you get is a lot of fun! This is exactly what happened recently at Byron Bay’s 7 Mile beach with Totally Wild coming to showcase youth and their endeavours to keep their local beaches clean.
It was a great example of how schools can collaborate with community to give students a real voice and a real audience. This makes their learning so much more authentic and increases student engagement. Features of the day inluded a flying drone camera that followed the kids around on the beach, capturing beach cleaning at its best, plus all of the high school students bringing their marine debris artworks down for display on the beach to show other young people some examples of how to get the marine debris message out to the general public.
The students will be showing their art at the Byron Bay Surf festival and teaching other kids about marine debris at the Youth Sustainability Forum at Southern Cross University coming up. There has been so much interest from teachers on the NSW North Coast to get involved in beach clean-ups and developing Source Reducation Plans that there will also be a teacher professional development day later in the year hosted by Tangaroa Blue Foundation, Dorroughby Environmental Education Centre and Southern Cross School.
Thanks to the Johnson Ohana Charitable Foundation for funding that assists Tangaroa Blue Foundation to work with school students around Australia!
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