Iziko museums are used by many institutions of learning, because of our many displays and easy public access. Fine Art students regularly use the displays for drawing exercises and assessment tasks. Our sites provide tour guide training institutions with venues for lectures, behind the scenes tours and practical demonstrations. Our scientists and curators host many research interns and post graduate students, and many scientists from other countries visit our museums to study the collections.

A lack of resources has unfortunately temporarily halted our ABET programme. We do however regularly offer teacher training programmes. Among the most popular are our art programmes. Recent themes and techniques have included printmaking, body maps, fabric painting, visual literacy and beadwork.

In Natural Sciences we have held successful workshops on internet research, using our Biodiversity Explorer website. The most recent addition to the programme has been a short course in specimen preparation. We hope to expand this into a fully fledged certificate course in basic taxidermy. The focus of the programme is to train science teachers to enable them to source and mount small mammals and birds for use as display specimens in their own classroom.

Courses are typically presented during school holidays or over several Saturdays during school terms. Iziko charges nominal fees to cover raw materials used and learners are allowed to keep anything they make in the workshop. Although members of the general public (particularly the unemployed) may participate, first preference is given to teachers and teachers-in-training.

World Teachers’ Day is marked with a programme for senior phase GET teachers in the Social and Natural Science and Arts & Culture learning areas. Themes include archaeology, slavery, human rights and palaeontology.

To find out about the next scheduled course, please contact jsilberman@iziko.org.za.