24 July 2026Project note
The materials are open, and they're in English
All six classroom sheets are now downloadable: the drawing activity, the questionnaire, the teacher's guide, the family consent sheet, the class context sheet and the follow-up lesson. They are English only, deliberately. A machine translation of a research instrument is worse than no translation at all — if the prompt shifts meaning between countries, the results stop being comparable. Ask us for the language you need and we will build it with a native speaker.
22 July 2026Method
One extra sheet, filled in by the teacher
We have added a class context sheet: one page per classroom, not per child, filled in while the children draw. It records what this class has already been taught about wildlife, whether they have visited a wild place, and what the teacher expects them to draw. Without it we could report that children in one country drew emptier futures than children in another, but not what that difference tracks with. It is the difference between describing a pattern and being able to say something useful about it.
10 July 2026From the field
Two schools, one hundred and fifty children
Misozi and Katchereza primary schools, both beside Kasungu National Park, have now completed the activity. Almost every child said protecting wild animals mattered to them. Seventeen drew a future with no animals in it. That gap between what children value and what they expect is the reason this project exists.
2 July 2026Method
Why the questions come before the drawing
It would be easier to teach a lively lesson about endangered species and then ask for a picture. It would also destroy the data. Children draw what they have just been told. So the order is fixed: a few short questions first, the prompt read word for word, then the drawing — and the wildlife lesson afterwards, never before.
18 June 2026Method
What a coding scheme has to survive
A drawing coded “threat” in Malawi and one coded “threat” in Finland have to mean the same thing, or the comparison is an illusion. Getting that right across cultures is the hardest open problem in this project, and it is why the coding is done centrally rather than by each school.