"I am Hun Makara and I work as a lecturer in the Provincial Teacher Training Centre in Siem Reap. I was never very interested in teaching environmental or agricultural life skills because I thought that it was almost impossible to do this in a successful way. Besides, I never considered it very important. Last year I was asked to become a member of the environmental education work group set up in our Centre in cooperation with VVOB. They organise trainings on teaching strategies to integrate life skills in our daily lessons. The knowledge and skills I gained during these training sessions changed my attitude and behaviour towards environment and agriculture. Suddenly teaching about environmental awareness did not seem so difficult anymore.
During a study visit to a model ‘Green School’ in Indonesia we learnt about teaching methodology for life skills. We were all very impressed to see how the complete school culture focuses on environmental awareness. I learnt a lot from this experience and it was easy to adapt the lessons learnt to the Cambodian context. In the ‘Green School’ everything is done together with the students; even lunch was prepared with vegetables grown by the pupils without using chemical pesticides. It was nice to see how student-centred approaches can be so easily implemented.
Seeing with my own eyes how environmental education and organic agriculture can be integrated in the daily school activities really motivated me to achieve similar successes at our Centre in Siem Reap. I am involved in the development of manuals for teaching environmental education to future teachers. In my free time I started an organic vegetable garden together with the student teachers who live on the campus. I think this initiative is very useful, as it motivates student teachers to enhance their awareness for eating healthy vegetables and taking care of the environment.
I am really convinced that, if the other teacher trainers have the same motivation as me, it will be easy for them to include environmental topics in their daily lessons because it is fun and the students like it a lot!"
