Volume 2, No. 20. October 25, 2002
Class
acts
Across the continent from Quassy and in another environment,s the Oregon Zoo
in Portland hired high schoolers to produce a “Let’s Go To The Zoo”
video preparing grade school classrooms for their field trips.
For zoos school groups tromping through the grounds is a double-edged sword,
and Oregon Zoo has long sent written material to teachers intended to express
the zoo’s mission and provide information about the logistics of their
visits.
“They always seem to not read the important stuff,” said Roger Yerke,
manager of education programs at the Oregon Zoo. “And we want the kids
to be prepared when they arrive, too. We thought if we could use a video, the
teachers would show it to the students, and at the same time the teacher would
get the information.” It also puts the orientation film in the classroom
rather than at the start of a classroom’s visit to the zoo so students
can be thinking about the zoo’s mission in advance of the trip.
To produce that video, Yerke and Rex Ettlin, the zoo’s education program
coordinator, decided on an unorthodox route. They approached Franklin High School,
where students were working on a project through the Northwest Film Center.
“We looked at examples of work the film studies program had done, and we
knew we’d get a quality product,” Yerke said. He got it at a much
lower cost than a professional video company would charge, too.
He would also get a product produced by a demographic that grade school kids
idolize. “In terms of getting something that was really in the right tone
and the right style and the right idiom to communicate to kids, kids would have
to do it,” Yerke said. The high schoolers met with Yerke’s staff,
learned the purpose and direction of the video, then came up with the concept
themselves and wrote the script.
The high schoolers then got fifth graders from neighboring Atkins Elementary
to act in the video, which featured superheroes Coat Woman, who told students
how to dress properly, Animal Amazing and Habitat Hero, who instructed students
on how to behave while viewing animals, and Garbage Can Man, who talked trash.
The video also put forth the zoo’s conservation and habitat message by
encouraging “low-waste lunches.”
“It was fun, it wasn’t dry, which it would have been if we’d
written it,” Yerke said. “I don’t know if anybody on our staff
would have come up with it. I never would have come up with Garbage Can Man
or Coat Woman.”
The 10-minute video had a preview screening for 200 Oregon teachers earlier
this month and “got a very positive response,” Yerke said. But however
popular the video may prove to be, he doesn’t expect it to spawn any new
zoo mascots. “I don’t foresee us having Garbage Can Man running around.
I don’t think we could hire anybody who could do it as well as the kids
did.”
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