More than 2,000 NSW school teachers took the opportunity of a free visit to Taronga Zoo to learn about the educational programs available to students on excursions.

Taronga Zoo Education Advisor, Alexandra Heagney, said the Teachers’ Open Day was a way of saying thank you to teachers for “everything that they do in their schools and in the classrooms” while also “showcasing the work the Zoo education team does”.

Taronga Zoo has Department educators based there, designing and delivering curriculum-aligned programs to 80,000 students annually at Taronga, 9,000 at Taronga Western Plains Zoo, and a further 9,000 through its Zoomobile outreach program.

“We want to be able to help teachers across the state bring learning to life and have impact with their kids,” Ms Heagney said.

“It’s been a 50-year partnership where the Department of Education has had teachers funded to sit at Taronga Zoo and so what we do for teachers is we design all of our lessons and link it directly to curriculum.

“It’s a way to bring their learning to life. In our workshops, we use real animals, so [students] get to meet animals, see them up close, touch their adaptations, feel them, connect with them as well.

“Also, we teach students about what they can do in their local community and area because ideally, we want this impact to be a long-lasting impact; to have a positive impact on the local environment.”

Ms Heagney said the lessons also highlighted the negative impacts humans have on the environment.

“So, it’s about bringing learning to life in those spaces and trying to drive that action and empowering those kids to be future conservationists and to care about their local environment,” she said.

To drive the conservation message home, Taronga Zoo has three immersive classrooms that recreate iconic habitats – a desert, rainforest and woodland environment – that may be unfamiliar to many students.

In each room, the animals native to the respective environments move freely around the space, conditioned to display natural behaviours.

Ms Heagney said the immersive classrooms provided a “real world connection” to those native habitats.

“So, it’s a cool opportunity because some kids have never been to a desert before and they get to go into that and meet different animals from that space,” she said.

“Some kids have never been to the rainforest before, so it provides that real world connection, not only on a local level looking at the Daintree or the temperate rainforests in NSW, but connecting it globally, to the Congo, to Sumatra, to tropical rainforests across the world as well”

Importantly, Ms Heagney said establishing that global connection with the different habitats helped students understand how they could make a positive impact on conservation at a local level.

“Even though they’re in Australia, they can have an impact, and that impact is [for example] influencing supply chains, understanding what you can do when you’re shopping,” she said.

The Taronga Zoo lessons and workshops are open to schools from government and non-government sectors however, the Zoo is working with the Department of Education Arts Unit to design specific High Potential and Gifted Education workshops for learners which will only be available for public school students.

The Zoo also has two ongoing “flagship” programs that have actively involved local public schools.

One is Project Penguin, soon to celebrate its 20th anniversary. The project focuses on protecting the Little Penguin colony in Manly and involves six local public schools and three Northern Beaches secondary school.

The other is Project Platypus which is delivered in partnership with Regentville Public School and Kingswood High School and supports conservation efforts for platypus populations.