Bangladesh Curriculum Review update

Fumiyo Kagawa and David Selby have completed their October to December 2014 consultancy for Save the Children (STC) as part of a DIPECHO project on school disaster management in Bangladesh to which a consortium of non-governmental organizations are contributing.  The consultancy involved a curriculum and textbook review called for by the Bangladesh National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB) with the intention of feeding outcomes into the national curriculum review currently planned for 2015-17.The consultancy involved:

• Collecting and analyzing commentaries on the Bangladesh curriculum relating to the presence or potential addition of disaster risk reduction (DRR), climate change adaptation (CCA), emergencies in education (EiE), school disaster management (SDM) and post-disaster learning and support in the curriculum

• Mapping and critically and creatively reviewing current DRR, CCA, EiE and SDM provision through the grade levels in the curriculum and textbooks

• Identifying opportunities for deepening and enriching DRR, CCA, EiE and SDM provision in the curriculum and textbooks, including opportunities to better enable child engagement in community capacity and resilience building

• Exploring and proposing means of embedding active and participatory DRR, CCA, EiE and SDM learning in the learning process, providing sample activities at pre-primary, primary, lower and upper secondary levels and showing how these can be integrated into textbooks

Outcomes were fed into a 58-page report, A Review of the Bangladesh Curriculum through the Lenses of Disaster Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation Learning, submitted to Save the Children on 19 December 2014.  The report analyses the Bangladesh pre-primary, primary and secondary curriculum from the perspective of opportunities, exploited or latent, for child-centered DRR, CCA, EiE and SDM learning.  Key issues are discussed and recommendations made, the report ending with four sample activities highlighting how active and participatory learning could be embedded in and hence enliven the textbooks.

The planned two-day workshops (one primary, one secondary) for NCTB members, orchestrated by STC and facilitated by the consultants, that were to take place in Dhaka in December 2014 are to be re-scheduled.