A new marine park for Singapore... and training to be a nature guide there

In August, the first Marine Park in Singapore, Sisters' Island Marine Park, was established. This marked a happy milestone for marine biodiversity conservation in Singapore! After decades of having our reefs and seagrass beds reclaimed, we finally have a little piece (approx 40 ha) that is protected. What a great initiative by our National Parks Board.

More about our local marine park here

As part of managing the marine park, NParks organizes guided tours of the park a couple of times each month. Last month, I got to know that opened up opportunities for the general public to sign up as guides at the park. Seeing this an opportunity to get to know our marine life hotspots better and spread the conservation message more widely, I signed up!

But before becoming a guide, I have to be trained first! The first part of the training was classroom-based, which was held earlier this week and last week. But this was no ordinary boring classroom theory lessons. Following the principles of The Leafmonkey Workshop, the classroom sessions (2 in total) were interactive and fun, involving engaging presentations, discussions and collaborative note-taking (using google docs, one of the best inventions ever) and role playing. Being a marine-themed workshop, this naturally involved many people morphing into marine creatures :P

Local conservationist Ria Tan giving a presentation (one of many!) on the finer points of guiding 

A little role-play action: how to deal with "difficult" visitors

A giant clam in the classroom!

The main message I took away from the workshop is that guiding is not as simple as bringing a group of people to a place and telling them about the organisms living there. It's way more complicated than that! Mostly, it's about putting yourself in your visitors' shoes and thinking about why they decided to visit the nature park in the first place. From there, you can connect with them help ensure that they have a good time. If they are having fun learning and discovering, they will want to listen to what you have to say, and then you can pass what you want them to know. If they had fun, they will want to come back, and let all their friends know about what a great time they had!

Here's a little sharing on some tips I learnt from the workshop on how to be an effective guide (thanks Ria for allowing me to share the workshop contents!)

1) Think of the top 3 things you want your visitors to Think, Feel and Do. Sure, it's great if you can pass on your scientific knowledge to your visitors, but in the end, it's how they FEEL after the whole experience that will cause them to want to make a difference.

2) Put yourself in the visitors' shoes and think of 3 things a visitor would WANT to do during the nature walk. If you can structure the way you guide according to their (reasonable) needs, you have a happy visitor :)

3) Think of the top 3 things YOU can do so that the visitors enjoy the walk, and the top 3 things you should NOT do.

4) Have a "Station 0" before the walk starts to let your visitors know that with every step they take, they can potentially kill something. Or hurt themselves. Therefore, stay on the designated trail!

5) If you come across a completely new organism you have no idea about, it's ok to admit you don't know! After all, we are volunteer guides, not walking encyclopedias. And of course, new species are being discovered constantly! If you can't identify it, either ask someone more experienced, or take a photo and look it up on the spot or on the way back (the power of smartphones), or encourage the visitors to take a picture and look it up themselves! Self-discovery is one of the best ways to learn.

And tomorrow we get to put all this knowledge into practice... because we are going out into the field for some hands on training! Stay tuned to see how it turns out.

A wealth of resources on Singapore's marine life... that most people don't know about. Hopefully this will change with the publicity and education that comes with opening up the marine park for guided walks!