Inspiring the next generation
WWT Learning Managers Joanne Newbury and Chris Whitehead treat us to their infectious enthusiasm.
WWT Learning Managers Joanne Newbury and Chris Whitehead treat us to their infectious enthusiasm.
Generation Wild
WWT Learning Manager Joanne Newbury on what makes her days in the office special.
Fourteen years ago, I was working in a high pressure job in industry at a time when I was re-evaluating my priorities in life. I’d gained a degree in biology, so I took an unusual route back to my first love. I started volunteering at WWT Washington, while taking a teaching assistant qualification, so that I could understand how classrooms work. That seemed to pave the way for me being appointed Learning Manager soon after. And I have come to the conclusion… BEST JOB EVER.
Every day and every school group is different, so the variety and scope of my role are motivating and never boring. The Washington team are such a supportive and positive group, so that helps the days flow by.
I’m most excited about starting WWT’s new Generation Wild project for schools, which we’ll be kicking off here in the North East this coming term. We know from research and our own on the ground observation that connecting with nature makes children feel happier, increases their self-esteem, and improves their behaviour as well as their physical and mental health. But we’re based in an area with a fair number of disadvantaged communities, and children from these communities often have fewer opportunities to make those connections with nature. Through Generation Wild, we’ll be working with schools, children and families in these communities to inspire the next generation of wildlife lovers. We’re starting children on a lifelong journey and we’ll be making nature come alive for them through five pathways: senses, emotion, compassion, meaning and beauty.
I feel that WWT is continuing to honour the legacy of Sir Peter Scott, to educate and enthral people about wetland life so that future generations can enjoy, nurture and protect it. Here’s to the next exciting 75 years.
How I got here
Chris Whitehead traces his colourful path towards the role of Learning Manager at WWT Martin Mere.
I was probably conceived in a field at Slimbridge - my parents lived in a caravan in a meadow also occupied by a bull! My father, Peter Driver, was volunteering for Peter Scott at the time. It didn’t last long, as they were both challenging individuals, nor did his relationship with my mother, who scarpered to a brackish lagoon at Canet Plage in the South of France. Many of my earliest memories are of pale pink clouds of flamingos in the hazy distance and red-winged grasshoppers amongst the spiky blue wildflowers around the lake.
My mother returned to the UK and we lived in Silverdale, Lancashire, at the heart of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It has such a diversity of habitats that Tetrad SD47 shows ridiculous numbers of plant and animal species, not least because so many amazing naturalists lived there. One of these was John Wilson, warden of RSPB Leighton Moss wetland reserve, just a mile away. I spent my childhood (mostly) with him and others as paternal role models.
For want of anything better to do, I started painting, mostly birds, then fungi, with watercolours, and became a moth recorder at the age of 16. University furnished me with an environmental sciences degree and a postgraduate certificate in science and geography education, so I set about teaching on the edge of the New Forest, but romance drew me back to France, where I lived in Brittany, painted and failed to keep my first marriage intact.
Returning again, I decided to combine my embryonic teaching skills with my well-practiced enthusiasm for wildlife and so founded my first charity, Landlife Education (a branch of the eminent urban wildlife group based in Liverpool). I spent eight years creating woodlands, ponds, meadows, school grounds and many other wildlife areas, volunteering with BTCV and developing teams of people who devised the most wonderful activities, which we took into schools throughout the North West of England. Following a brief trip to Mali, I returned to the UK with my new wife and was offered a job with Lancashire Wildlife Trust, setting up its education department, which went from strength to strength over the next 12 years.
Sadly, the money was still not enough, especially as we now had two daughters, so I took the mandatory ‘returning to teaching’ course at Edge Hill University. Whilst scrabbling around at supply teaching and other things to earn a crust, I was at a jobs fair in Preston where WWT’s late, great Pat Wisniewski phoned me. Sixteen years later, I’m still at Martin Mere doing what I believe in, always learning and hopefully passing on some of what I know.
