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

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Section 4.
Approaches to Integrating Disaster Risk
Reduction in the Curriculum
There are a range of different approaches
to integrating disaster risk reduction in
the curriculum, each with its own merits
and each with its own downsides.
Creating a hybrid approach out of the
several approaches has much to
commend it.
The 30 case studies featured in this report suggest some broad
approaches, none mutually exclusive, for taking forward
DRR-related curriculum development and integration.
Each is critically reviewed below.
The textbook-driven approach
This approach usually involves the curriculum arm of the
Ministry of Education, often working in conjunction with
national and international non-governmental organizations,
in revising textbooks of particular subjects to include,
or broaden the pre-existing treatment of, hazard-related or
disaster-related topics.
Advantages
Textbook revision is undertaken centrally. The adoption
of the revised textbook at the ministerial level ensures the
treatment of hazards and disasters within identified subjects
in all state schools.
In countries in which a “textbook culture” already exists,
teachers tend to readily take up the new hazard and disasterrelated
textual material.
There is no challenge to teachers’ traditional understanding
of their role and little need for teacher training going beyond
familiarization with the new textbook material (unless there
is a specific national intention to vivify the use of the text
book by introducing innovative approaches to handling textual
material).
Disadvantages
It is very doubtful whether textbook-led curriculum development
alone is able to deliver the skills, dispositional and behavioural
learning outcomes that disaster risk reduction education calls
for. Textbooks tend to focus on explaining the causes and
effects of hazards and safe behaviour and are unlikely to
foster active disaster preparedness and mitigation skills
development in and of themselves.
A textbook-based classroom culture encourages student
passivity and inhibits the interactive and experiential learning
that is seen as a means of fostering engaged and participatory
citizenship.
A centrally driven textbook approach is a ‘one-size-fits-all’
approach that is insufficiently reflective of and responsive
to local cultures and the need to address local hazard conditions.
Examples of textbook-driven disaster-related curriculum
development are offered by Bangladesh and Nepal
(case studies 26, 28).
The pilot project approach
This approach usually combines the production of new, often
multi-media, learning materials, the development of training
manuals developing new pedagogies and innovative forms
of assessment, and the training of instructors. It also usually
involves successive phases of pilot implementation in schools
in a limited number of school districts allied with successive
and widening waves of teacher training. Pilots may, in some
instances, be nationally sponsored and orchestrated but at
times are the brainchild of local and international non-governmental
organizations with, in some cases, thin lines
of communication with the central government.
Disaster Risk Reduction in School Curricula: Case Studies from Thirty Countries