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Environmental Education Programme for NZ schools

Sea Keepers was a New Zealand Charitable Trust established to promote a focal point for environmental education on all levels of the educational system and in the public domain. It ceased to exist in 1998. It was based on the idea that there are a wide variety of individuals, in all walks of life, who have dedicated their lives to taking care of the aquatic environment. These are the Sea Keepers. The Trust did three things:

1. It introduced sea keepers who have contributed to environmental improvements in the aquatic environment to school children and communities all over New Zealand;
   
   
2. encouraged school children and the sea keepers to work together to expand the environmental improvements from local activities to National and International community based actions;
   
   
3. provided the means for distribution of information about how communities and schools can make environmental improvements in their areas and at the same time offered a way to network valuable data on the state of the environment back to a central database or to the sea keepers.
   
   

Sea Keepers helped schools and communities join forces with the country's sea keepers to conduct community based environmental improvement projects. In 1996, our major programme was the Sea Keepers for Schools project, sponsored by the Telecom Education Foundation.

Sea Keepers for Schools offered NZ teachers and students the opportunity to talk with scientists and other experts about the health of our coastal waters, rivers and lakes. It also provided learning opportunities, classroom and field experiments that were integrated with the learning strands of the NZ curriculum.

How did Students Benefit?

By being involved in realistic and meaningful scientific data collection and analysis as part of a nationally coordinated programme in line with curriculum requirements.

Programmes focus on:

• New Zealand coastal and freshwater ecosystems,
  
• links between sea life and its physical environment,
  
• actions that can harm or help the creatures of the water environments,
  
• scientific skills involved in collection and analysis of data,
  
• hands-on field research to heighten the meaning of classroom investigations,
  
• recognition of the role of education in reversing the global decline in the health of our water ecosystems.