Enhancing Civic, Education, and Empowerment for Community Action: Intervention-Based Illustration from the “Turtle-Up” Project

• In Event: Protest, Democracy and Education

Proposal

The need to embrace the realities of interdependence for the benefit of intergenerational desires and aspirations is not in doubt. Principles of conservation, education, and transformation remain strategic livewire to advance ecological and global understanding on one hand, with cross-cultural, disciplinary, and intercontinental education on the other hand. Typical ways to address these concerns are not without undertaking civic and renewed thinking approaches. Global, continental, and national aspirations for achieving a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment are rooted in the United Nations' (UN) Human Rights to a Healthy Environment. The repercussions for failing to deal with the global priorities for the environment with its allied needs hold dire consequences, among which would be billions of people having to pay the costs, but on an unequal basis, including loss of lives.
Often, abuses of the environment are not apparent in the immediate future. It takes foresight, boldness, and strategic actions to halt such current practices without compromising the rights of the future generation to access their share of nature endowed in the environment. Based on these considerations, calls to individuals, groups, and nations to address such challenges through intentional and unintentional revolt or other schemes against repulsive actions are rife. Thus, the current presentation will focus on our intervention-based experience in designing and implementing experiential learning and the virtual support of educational actors to demonstrate the power of protest through the abhorrence of the harmful practice of killing turtles. We report on our community approach to garner global support to address this growing social ill of abusing and harming turtles in their natural habitat/environment. The project “Turtle up” is physically sited in turtle habitats across the coastal areas in Ghana, West Africa. The ecological value of turtles is not absent or misplaced in literature. Cautions to the depletion of the species, usually through killing them for consumption, without plans for replenishment, deprive the environment of a critical organism that engages in activities that counter the negative effects of Climate change and ocean pollution on the environment and the other organisms in its ecologies.
Through our “turtle up”, we leverage this presentation to engage our audience on our intervention-based approach to work through citizen action to advocate for the benefit of a decent life as well as achieve restorative goals for the environment and the society as a whole. A typical example can be cited of how “turtle up” places high value on the tenets of fair-trade learning; prioritizes reciprocity in relationships through collaborative, cross-cultural participation in learning, service, and shared goals as a two-way collaboration. Additionally, we present interventions designed to build the capacity of locals to seek other ways to improve the quality of their lives without resorting to the killing of turtles. These interventions aim to create jobs as well as offer enlightenment to locals to thrive economically, physically, mentally, and environmentally. Thus, in the process of advocating for the Sea Turtles, groups in localities that feel oppressed are offered the platform to voice their plights, whilst, at the same time, narratives on shifts in attitudes and behaviour to preserve the ecosystem through the education given are also accounted for. The presentation will conclude with a set of recommendations on the use of experiential learning and other approaches to enhance civic, education, and empowerment for collective community action, as well as protect the habitats of the turtles.

Authors

• Clara Araba Mills, University 0f Cape Coast

• Corinne Brion, University of Dayton

• Might Kojo Abreh, IEPA, UNIVERSITY OF CAPE COAST, GHANA