In spring 2025, graduate students in the University of Florida Museum Studies special topics seminar course, A Natural History: Zoos, Aquariums, and Botanical Gardens as Types of Museums—Connecting Living Connections, partnered with the Santa Fe (SF) College Teaching Zoo. The course is taught by Associate Professor of Museum Studies, Porchia Moore, Ph.D., in the School of Art and Art History (SAAH).
Throughout a series of zoo visits, SF Teaching Zoo staff taught our class about living collections management, the care and training of the animals in the zoo’s habitats and the role zoos play in wildlife conservation and education. In turn, our seminar class lent our knowledge of museum collections management and exhibitions that the zoo could utilize to strengthen its mission and impact on visitors.
“As we contemplate the future of museums in the 21st century, I wanted to teach a course that melded my passion for and deep love of museums into a course utilizing community engaged scholarship as an informative framework,” said Dr. Moore.
Based in SAAH’s Master of Arts in Museology program, this course included the first-year museum studies M.A. cohort, as well as grad students from a range of disciplines including anthropology, interdisciplinary ecology and studio art. Many of the zookeepers we worked with and observed are students in the Santa Fe College Zoo Animal Technology, A.S. degree program, whose hands-on education takes place at the SF Teaching Zoo under the supervision of professional staff.
“This was such a brilliant partnership and the research opportunities that emerged from this course were numerous," said Dr. Moore. "It was also wonderful to have students from across the university, which allowed us to have a very interdisciplinary experience. From the hands-on experience with the animals to the critical conversations with the Sante Fe staff, this was one of the most rewarding teaching experiences centering experiential learning that I have had—and we learned so much about being cross-pollinators between living collections represented by zoos, aquariums and botanical gardens.”
The SF Teaching Zoo is the only teaching zoo on a college campus in the United States that is accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), the main accreditation body for institutions dedicated to conservation, education, science and recreation. The AZA is widely recognized as the “gold standard” within the field and by federal entities such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
In addition to training future zookeepers, the SF Teaching Zoo’s mission is to educate and enrich the local community and to improve the future for wildlife. In our Zoos, Aquariums, and Botanical Gardens as Types of Museums course, my classmates and I were instructed to approach the SF Teaching Zoo like a museum.
Our primary objective in the course is to develop strategies to enhance the zoo’s educational outreach, conservation messaging and exhibition techniques by incorporating our knowledge of best practices in what is known as the ‘GLAMR’ (galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and recordkeeping institutions) sector.
Stepping out of the non-living archives and into living habitats
As a museum studies student in the first year of my graduate work at the time of participating in this seminar course, thinking about the SF Teaching Zoo as if it were a museum offered a unique opportunity for me to explore the varied potential applications of my future degree and skill set.
Our class visits to the zoo—where “living collections” include habitats where monkeys, otters and parrots reside—were a change of pace from my prior experiences in museum and archival spaces, where the non-living collections tend to stay on the shelves where they are placed. Throughout the semester, my classmates and I observed daily functions of the zoo and attended lectures given by the staff and reviewed zookeeper talks.
Once we were familiar with the zoo, SF Teaching Zoo director, Jonathan Miot, requested our class to conduct exhibit reviews on the habitats. These reviews help zoo staff understand what non-zoo professionals see when they visit. Our disciplinary knowledge of museum theories such as Universal Design Principles, which promote accessibility in exhibits, also made it possible for our class to suggest ways the teaching zoo could connect and communicate more effectively with visitors.
Some of our suggestions were practical, such as enlarging fonts for easier reading. Others encouraged the zoo to incorporate ‘personal’ details—such as including the name, age, and hobbies of the animals residing in the habitats—to help audiences go beyond learning general facts about the species and foster a more memorable connection with the individual animal in front of them.
Because our class is widely varied in our areas of study, we were able to provide the zoo with a multitude of perspectives to consider. Our diverse research areas—not only centered in museum studies, but also in studio art, ecology and anthropology—also meant that my classmates developed a variety of final projects intended to benefit the zoo.
Museum studies students, for instance, worked on a proposal for a label style guide for the exhibits, and developed a collections management plan for both animal records and institutional history. Meanwhile, studio art MFA students focused on visual art and design projects for the zoo.
Living collections demonstrate conservation research in action
Many of the animals at the SF Teaching Zoo have been rehabilitated but cannot be released into the wild. These animals serve as symbols for wildlife everywhere. The zoo’s all-ages educational mission aims to help visitors—especially children and youth visitors—make connections with these animals in hopes that the connections they make will instill lasting impact and inform zoo visitors how to care for the natural world around them.
The zoo recently initiated a series of structural changes and habitat improvements in alignment with its ten-year master plan. In March, SF Teaching Zoo’s resident small-clawed Asian otters moved to the Memphis Zoo as part of the AZA's Species Survival Plan, and the zoo is working to create a larger, improved habitat where the otters previously resided.
SF Teaching Zoo demonstrates a powerful commitment to providing habitats that prioritize its resident animals’ needs. Every design aspect serves to improve their welfare, including spaces for climbing and refuge where they can hide—allowing them to exist as they would in their natural habitats. The zoo aims to ensure that its living collections are a space where the animals residing in them can not only survive but also thrive.
Before taking this course, I was unaware how similar visitor education missions in zoos are to those of museums. The mission of many of today’s natural history museums is to inspire visitors to appreciate and engage with the natural world around them. Likewise, modern zoos like the SF Teaching Zoo seek to facilitate visitors’ education and encourage their engagement with conservation and preservation. My personal interest is in natural history museums, so it was interesting to compare the ways that wildlife conservation and preservation can be taught using both living and non-living collections.
In addition to caring for the animals’ basic needs and enrichment, Santa Fe zookeepers are continuously working to better understand and respond to them. This includes using the “button training” to broaden the animals’ vocabulary so that they can express their wellbeing and needs to the keepers.
Popular internet videos showcase buttons boards in action: the animal (often a pet dog or cat) presses specific buttons to create a sentence as if the animal is speaking. At SF Teaching Zoo, we observed capuchin monkeys (think: the monkey from Night at the Museum) and red-footed tortoises train with these buttons—but those are just two examples out of several species of animal in the zoo using buttons to communicate.
The sentences created by the animals are mainly fragments, but it shows promise for future interspecies communication. It also gives Santa Fe zookeeping students experience in developing training programs for the animals, conducting research and presenting their findings at conferences alongside their colleagues and instructors.
During a visit in February, I was fascinated to learn about how a monkey named Frappuccino used the buttons to notify the zookeeper that her hands were hurting from the cold and that she needed coconut oil to moisturize them. The keepers would have recognized Frappuccino’s needs eventually—but with the buttons, Frappuccino was able to communicate her needs quickly and directly. Watching the training sessions was entertaining and highlighted the innovative work of the zookeepers to learn about the animals and continuously improve their care.
My experience in the A Natural History: Zoos, Aquariums, and Botanical Gardens as Types of Museums course has been impactful in many ways. The course serves to diversify our entire class’s portfolio and demonstrate how our areas of study can be applied to different fields.
We were excited to get out of our “UF bubble” and experience more of Gainesville, and the different institutions that are at work for the community. I hope to see more partnerships like the UF Museum Studies and Santa Fe College Teaching Zoo collaboration take place in the future. A special thanks to Jade Woodling, Jonathan Miot and the fantastic team at Sante Fe for their powerful partnership.
