Disaster Risk Reduction in School Curricula: Case Studies ... - Unicef

143
Industrialized Countries
Family meeting in Te Kotuku Kohanga Reo,
peninsula of te Atatu, in New Zealand.
© UNESCO/J. Carlin
from disasters. Under each section up to six activities are
included, all falling within one or more of the four learning
areas. For example, under Section A there are activities on:
Hazard identification (mapping hazards in the locality and/or
the classroom with homework to draw a picture of hazards
at home)
Identify disasters (exploring graphical images and video
footage of disasters)
Identify Regional Disasters (asking whether each kind of
disaster could happen locally and making a graph and Venn
diagram of similarities and differences in terms of their
respective impact)
Historic disaster story (reading a story of a historical disaster
and then writing accounts as though present)
Find out who can help (making collages of people who
might need help in a disaster, discussing and role-playing
how they could be helped, inviting helpers in the community
to come to talk to the class)
Earthquakes (reading an earthquake story, making earth
quake posters, taking the posters home to alert the family).
The Hazard Identification, Identify disasters and Earthquakes
activities are linked to the Health and Physical Education
achievement objectives to ‘identify and discuss obvious hazards
in the home, school and local environment’ and to ‘identify risk
and use safe practices in a range of contexts’. The Identify
Regional Disasters and Historic disaster story activities are
matched with the Social Sciences achievement objectives to
‘understand how places influence people and people influence
places’, to ‘understand how time and change affect people’s
lives’ and to ‘understand how people have different roles and
responsibilities as part of their participation in groups’. The
Identify Regional Disasters activity links with the Science
achievement objective to ‘describe how natural features are
changed and resources affected by natural events and human
actions’ and with the English achievement objective to ‘acquire,
select and use sources of information, processes and strategies
to identify, form and express ideas’ (Ibid. 15-20).
The Teacher’s Guide also briefly enumerates windows of
opportunity for integrating disaster awareness into the following
curriculum areas: Technology and ICT, Food Technology,
the Arts, Mathematics, Learning Languages (Ibid. 50).
Pedagogy
Inquiry learning is particularly appropriate for WTPS. ‘Disaster
awareness education provides a rich learning context for inquiry
learning as it provides opportunities for students to build
their knowledge as they engage with their community, while
investigating answers to their questions and reflecting on their
learning’ (Ibid. 14).
Across the programme a varied diet of interactive and socioaffective
learning activities are offered, including:
Class and group work interpreting disaster pictures
Venn diagram work in pairs to find out what is common and
what is different about paired kinds of disasters
Interpreting stories of historical disasters and writing
imaginative stories as if present during the disaster
Making posters about disasters
Class review of school emergency plans, brainstorming
ways to improve the plans, and designing emergency
Disaster Risk Reduction in School Curricula: Case Studies from Thirty Countries