image: A page from the Shout Trout Workout comic written by Merryn Thomas and illustrated by Ethan Kocak.
It's important to communicate about hard-to-see and complex environmental topics and issues with young people. In an article published in People and Nature, an international team reflects on the group's creation of the Shout Trout Workout, a lyric poem, comic, and music video for children aged 8-14 years old designed to entertain, engage, and enrich learning about migratory fishes and aquatic environments.
The authors hope that sharing their experiences and reflections will be useful and inspiring for those who aim to create learning enrichment and engagement materials about ecological processes and environmental issues for young people.
"We wanted to share about fish migration in an educational and informative way and think we achieved this through our interdisciplinary collaboration with passionate creatives and academics," said lead author Merryn Thomas, PhD, of the Freshwater Interdisciplinary Research and Engagement (FIRE) Lab at Swansea University, in the UK. "We also learned a lot about co-creation along the way, which we hope will be useful for others who are interested in collaborating across boundaries to design inspiring engagement materials for young people about our natural environments."