The Environmental Education team of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Philippines made their first forays into online education under the nationwide lockdown with a digital class, held with Grade 4 students from Domuschola International School towards the end of April.

WWF-Philippines has partnered with Domuschola International School for environmental education sessions since 2017. With the challenges of the current situation, however, the organization is exploring new ways to continue with their work.

“The major challenge is that our Environmental Education team is used to physically going to schools and interacting with the students and teachers.  All our modules are designed to be facilitated this way. It’s fortunate that some schools were quick to adapt to an online platform like Zoom,” said WWF-Philippines Environmental Education Program Manager Dino Calderon. WWF-Philippines reaches out to the youth as it seeks to develop the next generation of conservationists.

Calderon himself led the online class, while students participated from the safety of their own homes. The talk centered on the biological richness of the Philippines and the importance of biodiversity to the world’s interconnected environmental systems, to which human beings are a part of and are reliant upon. For many of the young students of Domuschola, this was their first time understanding the relationships between man, nature, and the larger environment.

Calderon also punctuated the talk with quick facts on the country's own endangered species, such as the whale shark, to help the Domuschola students become familiar with them and to appreciate the situation of the threatened species of the Philippines.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the Philippine government to declare a nationwide lockdown. Since March, the Philippine public has had to adapt to life at home as the nation waits for the lockdown to lift. With the shut-down of schools, educational institutions have turned to e-learning practices, in order to continue educating their students from the safety of their homes.