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

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Section 10.
Case 18:
The Case Studies
New Zealand
procedure cards for different locations in the school
Brainstorming emergency items needed at home for
emergencies
Discussing what to do in What if? scenarios
Using the ‘think, pair, share’ cooperative learning process
to discuss what might happen after a disaster
Completing two-column ‘People who can help’ and
‘What they can do’ charts
Group work to determine the effects of a possible disaster
with multi-media presentations to the class
Questioning community members and members
of emergency management services invited to class
Hazard mapping in school and community
Exploring feelings and emotions of characters in disaster
stories with students using puppets to convey how they
think they would feel in and in the wake of a disaster
Brainstorming of feelings of those involved in disaster
scenarios
(Ibid. 19-46).
Student Assessment
The WTPS Teacher’s Guide recommends the use of ’formative
assessment techniques to shape their ongoing interactions
with students and to inform their planning’ (Ibid. 14).
The junior, middle and senior level unit plans offer suggested
assessment criteria that might be employed for either formative
or summative assessment. Templates for how to design pro
forma for student self and peer assessment are given as is
advice on how to build teacher-conducted assessment into
a learning program (Ibid. 47-8).
A survey of teachers who had used WTPS garnered very few
actual examples of formal assessment of student learning
(Johnson, 2011, 28) although many of the survey participants
felt that assessment would be relatively easy to conduct
through approaches such as behavioural observation (including
of community application of knowledge acquired), student
self-assessment, peer assessment, role play assessment
and assessment of presentations (Ibid. 30-1).
Teacher Professional Development/Guidance
When What’s the Plan Stan? became available in 2006,
MCDEM hosted fifteen teacher workshops in different parts
of the country to introduce teachers and principals to the
resource, with some 700 educators in all participating (Ibid. 6).
Since then, support for teachers has been restricted to what
is available in the WTPS Teacher’s Guide (MCDEM, 2009).
Johnson’s 2011 survey of the implementation of WTPS brings
teacher concerns about how to address students’ emotional
responses, the fears and sensitivities elicited by considering
disaster hazards, to the surface. It was mentioned that teachers
had received no training in this area. [Few teachers reported
using the ‘Feelings and Emotions’ activities in the WTPS
programme.] Some respondents also pointed out that following
the 2011 Christchurch earthquake there had been a dispersal
of families, children and some teachers around the country
and that disaster awareness learning could be an emotionally
fraught experience for those who had been in Christchurch.
The survey raises the issue of how teachers should conduct
disaster risk reduction education in contexts in which there has
been an immediate or close encounter with disaster, an issue
that has clear training implications (Johnson, 2011, 21, 22, 47).
Disaster Risk Reduction in School Curricula: Case Studies from Thirty Countries