Training videos: How to be a Zero Waste Ambassador and Trainer?
Written by Kadri Kalle, Education Program Manager
Year 2022 has been special for our training programs at Let’s Do It Foundation. Although we didn’t organize that many trainings ourselves, we finished a two-year collaborative work with four other organisations and released two training programs – the Zero Waste Ambassador Curriculum and Zero Waste Trainer Curriculum.
Creating both programs was a long and thorough work – we tested our content in pilot trainings in 2021, consulted and interviewed our participants, and brought together expertise both from zero waste and teaching in order to compile training programs that truly give the competences needed for Zero Waste Ambassadors and Trainers. One part of that work was also writing a comprehensive handbook. And since we didn’t want our handbook to be only written text, we also made two videos. These videos also summarize nicely what both training programs are about and therefore they fit beautifully as our end-of-the-year post.
Both videos take into account the basic principles of educational psychology which are universal for everybody. But different behaviour protocols and communication styles can apply in different cultures. We created these videos with European cultural and practical context in mind, so extra information and/or adaptations might be needed for groups and communities outside of Europe.
Training video for Zero Waste Ambassadors
Knowing a lot of things about zero waste is one thing but being able to get people on board with it is a bit different story. In the end it’s knowing about how, when and what kind of information to give out, and when to ask questions and listen instead. In this video
we give a short glimpse of how a Zero Waste Ambassador could approach a municipality representative with zero waste proposals. Learning to listen and ask more than talk was something that several participants of our Zero Waste Ambassador pilot training also brought out as one skill they put in practice with good results in their own zero waste work after the training.
The video has accompanying chapter from our handbook that gives an overview why the Ambassador in the video acts the way she does, why and when she asks the question that she does. The chapter is also available in Estonian, French and Slovenian. The video itself has subtitles in English, Estonian and French.
Where to use the video: it can be used as part of the Zero Waste Ambassador training course, or simply as a smaller session on how to present zero waste idea to others. For zero waste organisations it can also be an exercise in an onboarding process for your new members.
Training video for Zero Waste Trainers
As most trainers in zero waste, we are also experts in the field. And one of the challenges of teaching as an expert is actually to suppress our need to give correct answers right away. Because for the learning to happen, it’s the learners who need to discover the answers on their own, with the support of the teacher. In this video
we give a compressed example on how to deal with some common zero waste misconceptions in a learning setting.
Although the video shows a seminar, it’s important to remember that learning as such can also happen in meetings, in informal chats at events, etc. Of course, we cannot present our slides and data the same way there, but we can still trigger the thinking process of our conversation partners with good questions. We also have a separate chapter on questions in our handbook by the way.
The video has accompanying chapter from our handbook that gives an overview why the Trainer chooses these particular methods and questions in the session when tackling participants’ misconceptions. The chapter is also available in Estonian, French and Slovenian. The video itself has subtitles in English, Estonian and French.
Where to use this video: it can be used as part of the Zero Waste Trainer training course, but also in shorter sessions where communication on environmental topics is being tackled. It could also give ideas and input to any person who teaches zero waste and/or other environmental topics on how to deal with people’s misconceptions and how to teach these topics better.
We hope you find these videos and our other teaching materials useful. We are also curious to know if and how using them has worked for you, so you can always give your feedback to us in here.
Finally, as we end 2022 and welcome the new year, words of thanks to our partners who made this work happen: Zero Waste Europe, Ekologi brez meja, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Tallinn University and of course, Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, who funded it. I hope we’ll have many future trainings ahead with all of them 🙂