Biography:

Savita Custead is the Director of the Bristol Natural History Consortium, a collaboration of a collaboration between Avon Wildlife Trust, BBC, Bristol City Council, Bristol Zoo Gardens, Environment Agency, Defra, Natural England, University of Bristol, The University of the West of England, Wildscreen, and Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust . Through the charity, she directs the annual Bristol Festival of Nature, and the Communicate conference for environmental communicators. Prior to running the Consortium, Savita helped run dialogue and consultation projects for Ecsite-UK. This role included researching, writing and testing debate materials for young people on biomedical issues such as premature babies and vaccinations, supporting science centres to run events, presenting the results to bodies such as the Nuffield Research Council, and creating a facilitation skills training pack that is still used to train science centre staff. She has organised a wide range of debates for adults and mixed audiences, including the Bristol Green Capital debate in 2008 that attracted nearly 300 visitors and provided the basis for the Bristol submission to the European Green Capital. Savita has run training sessions in public engagement for researchers, museum staff, community practioners and PhD students, and has led public engagement projects for Research Councils, NGOs and universities..

Abstract:

Director, Bristol Natural History Consortium

The annual Bristol Festival of Nature promotes excellence within informal science education through family activities delivered by up to 200 organisations at one event. At the 2009 Festival, a series of Darwin-themed activities and the Darwin Now Exhibition gave 35,000 visitors the opportunity to interact with Darwins work. A key element of the programming strand was evaluation of the learning and impact of including these projects within a nature and conservation focused event. Yet a difficult issue arose in the planning and delivery of the various activities. As educators we often try to control or carefully target messages about evolution and Darwin in order to achieve certain educational outcomes. However, what happens in an informal learning environment, when visitors learn in individual self-defined exploratory ways? During the planning process we may have taken political or religious viewpoints into consideration, deliberated learning styles, or adapted previous programmes. Yet in a an informal learning situation, we often do not get to interact directly with our visitors, control how they consume our educational materials or easily assess the impact of our programmes? How can we learn from our visitors, and improve our educational practice? What will be Darwins educational legacy?