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International Guest Lectures Promote Conservation Learning

With the increasing importance of international issues in biodiversity conservation, education, and policy (Dunning 1997; Medellin 1998; Warren 1998; Ginsberg 1999), we need to make our courses relevant to today’s issues and as interesting as possible to undergraduate students. Like most conservation professionals, we routinely use our scientific field experiences (e.g., Maehr 1997; Widen 1997) in the classroom to provide regional case studies of conservation importance. Yet our geographic breadth is restricted to a few parts of single countries, and our experiences alone are often insufficient to bring authentic international viewpoints into the classroom. Thus, what students learn about global issues may reflect regional biases and misconceptions. Although there may be “no substitute for a flesh and blood instructor” (Schoellhorn 1994), a variety of teaching methods is available for enhancing undergraduate learning in global biodiversity conservation. For example, distance learning, including the use of the Internet, has become increasingly common with the proliferation of satellite technology (e.g., Roach 2001). But effective implementation requires attention to some technical and pedagogical problems, especially for use at domestic and international scales (McGettigan 1999). Digital teaching aids, such as those developed by Wilson and Perlman (1999), offer a world view of biodiversity conservation as a teaching supplement for the modern computerized classroom. Beyond technological tools, we argue that finding ways to bring a greater diversity of perspectives into conservation biology courses is of great importance. Stevens (2000) describes an international exchange among English and Bulgarian educators that resulted in measurable positive changes in pedagogical methods and that facilitated subsequent international visits. In this spirit, a chance meeting between us led to an opportunity to gauge global biodiversity awareness in two undergraduate conservation biology classes—one in Sweden and the other in the United States—and to explore the effectiveness of incorporating international guest lectures as a regular part of our traditional instructional approach. Here we use our experiences as guest lecturers in each other’s courses to explore the costs and benefits of providing personal international perspectives to our students and to discuss the potential for this and similar instructional strategies to enrich courses in conservation biology.