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Overview

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CT team at Cincinnati Zoo, Feb. 2022

Conservation Tales - 2022 Central America Series

The Conservation Tales project is finishing work on two new books for this series of children's books. The books will feature Sloths and Macaws, and will make up the new "Central America Series." The set will be published in May 2022.

(click the thumbnail images to see the full-size photo)

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CT Team meets macaw trainers at Cincinnati Zoo.

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CT team with Joe, a sloth at Zoo Knoxville.

Conservation Tales is an interdisciplinary team of students and faculty who work with a variety of external partners to create children's books about wildlife conservation and authentic science practices. In 2022, our external partners include The Sloth Institute and the Macaw Recovery Network, both located in Costa Rica. The team also met with staff at the Cincinnati Zoo, Zoo Knoxville, and the Indianapolis Zoo.

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The new Central America series of the Conservation Tales books.

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Previous books in the CT collection

The books produced in Spring 2022 feature Macaws and Sloths. Both books will be published in both English and Spanish.

These books join 15 previous volumes in the project's catalog.

Each book presents two important messages for children - "Everyone can protect wildlife," and "Anyone can be a scientist."

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CT Project is a diverse team of students!

The team represents a diverse blend of academic disciplines spanning four different colleges within the university. Team members are majors in many different subjects. Drawing, Animation, Visual Communications, Life Science Teaching, Landscape Architecture, Journalism, Spanish and Photography.

The team collaborates with scientists to develop a story about a child who learns about the animals, the scientists, and conservation actions the readers can do at home. Together, they use the wide range of skills they bring to the team to produce high quality products.

We invite you to learn more about...

  • the Process the team uses,
  • the Products they are developing,
  • the Team members who make up the 2022 CT Project,
  • and the Partners from outside the university who contribute to our work!
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Scientists and conservationists are diverse...

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... and the characters in our stories are diverse, too!

Just as diversity is important to our team, diversity is important in conservation! To support our message that "Everyone can protect wildlife," we want to depict that in our books. Diversity is one of the major overarching themes in all our books!

The characters developed by our team reflect a diverse group of scientists, children and families! In this year's books, we have the added feature of showing diversity in language - Our scientific partners in Costa Rica requested versions in Spanish to support their public outreach and education programs!

The diversity theme helps make our books ideal for schools, informal education and home learning. Parents, teachers and children have told our project that they like seeing "people who are like them" in the stories.

Overview