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

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Section 7.
Teacher Professional Development
in Disaster Risk Reduction Education
Upskilling teachers for effective delivery
of disaster risk reduction curriculum
involves a combination of training in
hazard- and disaster-related content
and training in facilitation of active
forms of learning.
This is happening in some cases.
However, thus far such training happens
as a one-off event with no follow-up or
teacher aftercare.
All the extended case studies featured in this report make
reference to the training and/or guidance of teachers in facilitating
disaster risk reduction learning in the classroom. Approaches
differ. In some cases, no training event has been held but a
teachers’ guidance manual has been developed and, finances
permitting, widely distributed. In other cases, training has
taken place at only a localized piloting stage with no movement
to scale of either the curriculum or associated professional
development. In other cases at-scale teacher training has often
taken place according to a cascade model, i.e., the training
of trainers, who then proceed to train other teacher trainers
or to train teachers in their own jurisdiction. In yet other cases
teacher professional development is primarily made available
through a website or widely circulated professional journal.
Across the case studies there is considerable variation in who
else, beyond the teachers receives training. There are a number
of examples of principals and local/national educational administrators
receiving training, separately from or attending the
same workshop as the teachers. Officers of local and international
non-governmental organizations oftentimes join, and contribute
to, the training.
Examples of DRR professional development that is entirely
or almost exclusively guide-driven DRR professional development
include Nicaragua, Egypt, Bangladesh and Nepal (case studies
23, 25, 26 and 28). Primarily website-led teacher support is a
feature of developments in Japan, New Zealand and Peru (case
studies 17, 18, 24) while the Russian Federation (case study 4)
has a professional journal with features on best practices and
local experiences in DRR teaching.
Teacher training at the pilot or pre-scale level has taken place in
Armenia, Cambodia, Fiji, Lao PDR, the Philippines, Japan and
Costa Rica (case studies 1, 6, 7, 9, 17 and 21). At-scale cascade
training is taking place in Kazakhstan, Turkey, Indonesia
and Madagascar (case studies 3, 5, 8, 14). In France (case
study 16) at-scale training takes place with the agreement
of the Ministry of Education through trainers of a national
institute who are spread throughout all school districts.
In Georgia (case study 2) at-scale training occurs through the
offices of experts in education and emergency management
attached to national bodies.
Forms of delivery of teacher training differ as do the nature and
purposes of the training. Some training is content-focused,
with the expectation that teachers will leave the training having
acquired a general sense of the content they are meant to
impart. It can be safely said that most training is of the ‘recipe
book’ genre, i.e., teachers learn how to manage lessons stepby-step
according to a guidebook. However, the training does
not appear to develop their ability to handle and develop the
material provided flexibly and creatively. The content-focused
and recipe approaches are reflected in the teacher guides that
accompany the training. In the former case the guide is more
or less restricted to disaster-related content, with little or no
reference to pedagogy, and is usually laid out to parallel the
chapters of the student textbook. In the latter case, there are
‘how to’ instructions that offer no encouragement to creatively
stray from the recipe.
Rather more holistic approaches to professional development
are offered in a few of the countries featured in this report.
The to-scale training in Georgia (case study 2) pairs learning
about disaster risk reduction with learning how to facilitate
Disaster Risk Reduction in School Curricula: Case Studies from Thirty Countries