The education team provide training and support in a range of education best practice approaches and methods. Below you will find an overview of these approaches and links to relevant projects and resources.

• Participatory approaches (incl co-creation)
• Behaviour Centred Design
• Interpretation
• Science communication
• Evaluation
• Social Inclusion

Participatory Approaches

What is it?

Participatory approaches are ways in which new voices can participate in the conversation. There are a number of approaches from consultation right the way through to co-creation. BGCI’s has used the co-creation approach in a number of BGCI led projects.

The aim of co-creation is to create shared ownership of a project between institutions and communities. The idea is to co-operate and learn from others and build a strong connection between groups which enables them to raise awareness and sensitivity towards important issues.

During our co-creation training, we train individuals to become facilitators who bring people together, while ensuring the control remains in the hands of the co-creators. Using a co-creation approach you meet your audiences’ needs, build stronger relationships and widen your audience.

The co-creation includes various steps, including two main stages; the ideation phase in which the group creatively generates, develops, and communicates new ideas, and the iteration phase in which the group revisits and improves ideas.

This approach empowers participants to create their own ideas from beginning to end, stimulates ownership of their ideas, and builds relationships between groups that last beyond the scope of the project.

Co-creation projects

Project

Completed

BigPicnic

Global

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Project

Completed

LearnToEngage

Europe

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Project

Ongoing

Co-creation of public engagement activities to promote alternative livelihoods in Southern Tajikistan

Global

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Behavior Centred Design

What is it?

Behavior Centered Design (BCD) approach for behaviour change in conservation:

The Behavior-Centered Design approach consists of 8 steps and has been developed by RARE, the center for behavior and environment, in order to build breakthrough solutions to environmental challenges. It is based on a combination of behavioral science and design thinking.

These are the steps of the BCD approach:

1. Frame: Identify the actors and behaviors that have a meaningful impact on your environmental goals.
2. Empathize: Collect data about the target audience and behavior using their perspective to understand their motivation, barriers, and context.
3. Map: Draw links between data observations and behavioral insights using your behavioral lens to get more effective solutions.
4. Ideate: Brainstorm, combine and prioritize ideas. By expanding the realm of possible ideas, you will think more creatively.
5. Prototype: Develop a small-scale version with the essential features of your solution. This way you don’t have to invest a lot in resources, and it makes your idea tangible.
6. Test: Test the prototype by validating your hypotheses about what motivates behavior and get feedback so you can improve the solution.
7. Launch: Plan and launch your solution to see if it works in the real world.
8. Assess: Measure the impact and monitor change in order to see if the behavior change is happening and to what degree it happens.

This approach is highly effective because all environmental problems and solutions involve behaviour change. The BCD approach helps identify target behaviours and develop strategies to change them. By using small, incremental steps, it creates a strategy that will have a larger and more lasting impact. The most important aspect of this approach is that it provides an opportunity to understand the barriers preventing people from adopting the desired behaviour and to find solutions to overcome these obstacles.

BCD projects

Project

Ongoing

Improving Community Sustainable Natural Resource Management of Mount Mulanje

Africa

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Interpretation

What is it?

Interpretation is an essential element of a botanic garden, connecting the garden to its visitors, adding to the visitor experience, helping to develop new audiences, inspiring people’s interest in plants, making the collections meaningful and helping to gain public support. Good interpretation is not just about transmitting information in a passive way, but should actively engage the visitor and help them make sense of what they are seeing or experiencing by revealing something that they may not know or by getting them to think a little more critically about an object or concept. To do this effectively you therefore need to know a lot about your audience and what your ‘take home’ message or theme is. Interpretation methods can include panels, trails, guided tours, apps, exhibitions, labels, events and the creative arts amongst others.

Interpretation resources

• Training module on Interpretation: BGCI offers a comprehensive training module exclusively for our members. This module provides valuable insights into the importance of interpretation in botanic gardens and guides participants on how to develop effective interpretation plans.

• Webinar for the South American Botanic Garden Network on Introduction to Interpretation: In our efforts to reach a broader audience, we delivered a webinar on interpretation for the South American network of botanic gardens, presented in Spanish. This webinar was led by Ane Zabaleta, the Education and Training Manager in BGCI.

Science communication

What is it?

There are a wide range of terms related to how science is shared with the public including science communication, public engagement with science, science outreach, public understanding of science, lifelong science learning and scientific literacy. In its simplest form science communication is about getting science from scientists to non-scientists and this can occur in a number of ways either directly from the scientist or via science communicators and educators. Contemporary science communication however is about much more than providing people with information. Solutions to many issues, e.g. climate change, require an inter or transdisciplinary disciplinary approach where fields such as technology, engineering and social sciences all play a part. The process is therefore about creating opportunities for dialogue and so the communication needs to occur in more than one direction and between various different groups e.g. the scientific community, the public, industry, government, the media and museums and science centres.

Science communication resources

• Training module on Science Communication: Available to our members, this module offers essential tips on how to effectively communicate science, the history of science communication and provides lots of great examples of science communication activities.

Evaluation

What is it?

Evaluation activities provide evidence about how any projects and programmes are meeting their aims and objectives and encourages project improvements. It also acts as an excellent tool to tell others about the good work being carried out and to share lessons learned and best practice with colleagues. Without evaluation, we can waste time and money by offering something that doesn’t fit the bill or that no-one is interested in. It can also lose us funders and audiences. Evaluation can be done at the start or early stage of a project or programme (formative evaluation) or at the end to gauge the success or impact (summative) and can be either qualitative or quantitative. Research is always needed when doing evaluation, to collect data that will provide your evidence. However research is vital in its own right for educators – to keep up to date with current issues, support working methodology, enhance knowledge and maintain high quality performance.

Evaluation resources

• Training module on Evaluation: Available to our members, this module offers essential tips on how to effectively evaluate educational programs, ensuring they meet their intended goals and continuously improve.

• As part of the Communities in Nature project we produced two evaluation themed webinars. 

Social inclusion

What is it?

For most botanic gardens, the role of plants and plant conservation is approached from a scientific perspective rather than a social one. Given that environmental and social issues are so closely intertwined, growing a social role is vital in order for botanic gardens, as well as other scientific and educational institutions, to prove their modern-day relevance by engaging with their local communities on issues of mutual concern. Recently, there has been an increasing emphasis on breaking down barriers to access and engaging with a much broader range of people. In particular, publicly funded botanic gardens and other museums are being asked to demonstrate that their services represent good value, are responsible and relevant to the needs of their communities and are developed in partnership with them. By using participatory approaches, such as co-creation, and reaching out to more diverse audiences, botanic gardens are looking to become more inclusive and are starting to work more proactively with their communities. Developing their social role going forward however will require botanic gardens to rethink their purposes and to renegotiate their relationship to, and role within, society.

Social inclusion resources

BGCI has been encouraging botanic gardens worldwide, through their Communities in Nature project, to follow the museum lead and grow their social role. Working through their ‘Communities in Nature’ programme, BGCI has supported pilot projects in a number of UK botanic gardens, such as Ness and Westonbirt and produced a manual and report, sharing case studies and best practice with its membership. BGCI has also produced a number of webinars and a short video on the theme. A number of articles on this theme have been produced in both ‘Roots’, BGJournal as well as in chapter 7 of the ‘Manual on Planning, Developing and Managing Botanic Gardens’.

BGCI’s EU funded Horizon 2020 project ‘BigPicnic’ promoted the development of consortium Partner gardens’ ‘social role’ by the implementation of co-creation activities throughout the project.