How many school children in Aberdeen City and Shire aren’t aware of the two rivers that flow through them? It’s hard to put a number on this, but in my experience working in outdoor education and outreach, I’ve come to realise that it is more than you would think.
I recently visited a school in Aberdeen through the River Dee Trust’s Education Programme, taking a piece of the river into the school playground and challenging pupils to build their own fully functioning river system – in miniature scale.
With a re-used tarpaulin sheet, found natural materials and a one litre bottle of water, you would be amazed what pupils can create in a short period of time. I always begin these playground sessions with a short introductory talk about the river, asking pupils plenty of questions along the way to see what they already know. Can anyone tell me where a river begins? What about where it ends? Where is your closest river to the school?
While some classes can answer this final question before I’ve even finished speaking, a number of them struggle. This school in particular was only a short 10-minute walk from the river itself, with pupils most likely crossing the river or walking alongside it to reach the school from home in the morning. Yet a good number of the pupils I visited could only name one of their nearest bridges, and not the river that it crosses.
My job is to increase awareness and encourage appreciation of what we are incredibly lucky to have here on our doorsteps. The River Dee Trust has been delivering free educational visits to schools for over ten years, and since 2020 has run a dedicated Education Programme to foster life-long connections in our young people with this part of our local natural heritage.
Education is vitally important to the River Dee Trust and is one of the charity’s two main aims; alongside improving our knowledge of the ecology of the river through science and research so that practical improvements and restoration of the river can be achieved.
It’s not just visits in to schools that we offer either, we promote outdoor learning wherever possible and host guided visits to a riverbank near the school and through trips further afield. Thanks to our Education Programme funders CNOOC Internation and TAQA, we are able to do this free of charge.
This term marks a huge milestone for us, as by the Easter break, we’ll have visited over 10,000 school-aged children since the inception of the programme in 2020 - providing opportunities to those young people who may not have previously known about the rivers that flow through Aberdeen City and Shire, let alone visit them.
If you would like to find out more about the Trust’s educational visits, or are interested in helping us inspire the next generation of biologists, conservationists and countryside rangers able to look after our rivers, please visit https://riverdee.org.uk/learn-about-the-dee/