Increasing reach: Teaching new teachers at FU

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 that is protected by law RA 9163 for tertiary level students. The aim of the law is to promote the role of youth in nation-building. MCP sees this as a great opportunity to enhance marine awareness.

Under the umbrella NTSP, there is a Reserved Officers Training Corps (ROTC) which is a civic education and defense preparedness program for Filipino freshmen. The other one is Civic Welfare Training Service (CWTS) which they hold community immersion programs and Literacy Training Service (LTS) which specializes in education of the people that includes school children and out of school youth and empower them through teaching.

So how does this all key in with the advocacy of Marine Conservation Philippines?  Well, MCP partners with the CWTS and LTS programs teaching first year students and enhance 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 and expose freshmen students to talk about and teach about marine life with various field activities. The idea, is that through our partnership with elementary schools  these Freshmen University students will have the chance to also share the information they learned from us to the elementary school children. This way, we are reaching more people in our quest for marine awareness and teaching them to be environmental advocates.

Recently, we started with 300 freshmen students in Foundation University introducing ourselves and what MCP is doing, and other conservation engagements around Negros Oriental. Our future engagement with these students include activities that expose them to the problem of plastic pollution in the country such as beach clean ups.