Thomas Zamora: My Second Week At The Georgia Aquarium


                                           Thomas Zamora:

 

                    My Second Week At The Georgia Aquarium


Beluga Enrichment and Play

During this last week, I had the opportunity to interact with the amazing team, including our education director, Bailey, and offered my assistance in various areas, such as camp and office work. I also had the chance to network with different departments, leading to some exciting prospects for the future.


Ocean Voyager Exhibit (and Tank, the Green Sea Turtle)

One of the primary goals set for me in this internship was to make the Georgia Aquarium a more linguistically inclusive space. To achieve this, I focused on translating the online lesson plans provided to school groups and educators. I worked with my collogues to outline the process and then I translated all of the online material for the Aquarium this week into Spanish.

 

This California Sea Otter was observing his caretakers diligently—he knew that feeding time was soon.

A highlight of my second week was the opportunity to meet Bailey, the education director at the Georgia Aquarium. Michaela generously took some time to set up a meeting for me to introduce myself to him, and during our meeting, we also discussed the significance of linguistic accessibility and the positive impact it could have on the overall educational experience for visitors. 

I told him that could imagine a young kid who doesn't know how to speak Spanish or speaks a different language, and is interested in animals and marine sciences, and that they could feel like there's a invisible barrier between them and the aquarium. Someone might get the opportunity to come here, and is so excited to experience all of our exhibits, but then they aren't able to access and understand the same information that other people have, and a child might get the impression the sciences are a field that is supposed to be for only English-speakers; changing that narrative is the goal that I intend to act on. 


                                                                              A Curious South African Penguin 

Bailey expressed his thoughts about this weakness and provided enthusiasm for the translated lesson plans and even said he could offer some of his time to help me draft a proposal to some of the other departments to introduce an idea of mine to the aquarium. Ultimately, my experience has further strengthened my belief that continuing to serve my community is to inspire the next generation through the power of education and language, breaking down barriers, connecting people from diverse backgrounds to their desires in life, and guiding others towards truth and honesty.


I look forward to the upcoming weeks with great anticipation, eager to continue learning and contributing to the Georgia Aquarium's mission of inspiring the conservation of our aquatic world. Next week I return to Camp H2O. Thank you for joining me on this journey, and until next time, Adiós!


Whale Shark Feeding Clip




    

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

National Museum of the American Latino - Camila - Week 2

Image
On  Monday, I worked on my project outline for the Smithsonian Adventure Lab scavenger hunt. I researched possible locations and possible objects. I also began to imagine the most efficient order in which to put the stops, which helped me in selecting some locations. On Tuesday I helped facilitate a 9 am tour at the Molina Family Gallery. This was another 4-H tour of about 50 people. They were very attentive during the tour despite being such a large group, and we had some interesting discussions during the activity time. We discussed the terms “Latino, Latinx, Hispanic, Chicano” etc. and the presence of Asian ancestry in the Latino community.  From 10 am to 4:30 pm, I spent time in the General Motors Learning Lounge replacing the table covers, setting up some additional activities, and general housekeeping like picking up fallen post-it notes and adjusting the book shelves. We had a lot of visitors coming in throughout the day to play dominos, play with the stuffed groceries ...
Read more

National Museum of the American Latino - Camila - Week 4

Image
The final week! I am working 4 days after today to make up for the days I missed for the Hispanic Heritage Foundation event. This final week, I was finalizing the scavenger hunt project, including making a fun design presentation for it that displays what players see when they first click on the scavenger hunt. In the upcoming days, I am finalizing all the project details, including proofreading, formatting the information into a Word document, and submitting it. At the learning lounge, I had been reading The Undocumented Americans on the slow mornings and I finished it yesterday! It is one of my favorite books now. For the scavenger hunt project, I collected all the images needed for the app, which included 1 cover image and 1 completion image for each stop. So I have found approximately 19 images. I also worked on the location description. This was particularly fun because I was able to show the personality of the character I created to be the virtual “tour guide”.  Today (Wednes...
Read more

El Paso Museum of History - Week 4 - Deborah

Image
  Week 4 July 31st Something about directories is that there are three different ways to search something up. The easiest would be by the business name, then the owner's name, and finally the hardest one is by address. Since I had already gone through most of these books and still couldn’t find the business by name, I had to do the hardest method and go by. I had to call in the pro,  Michael. Shoutout Michael!!!! He showed me how to search them up by address which is normally at the very end of the directory and for this method your map would be beneficial. After Michael taught me exactly how to do it, I got locked in and started doing my research that at first, made me frustrated because my progress was stunted for a while. However, I didn’t give up, I knew I needed to get this job finished so I continued looking. In the end, I thankfully found some businesses using this method and could not have been happier.  Finding a Business by Address Finding a Business by Name Aug...
Read more