Empowering Children to Lead Change: Incorporating Preparedness Curricula in the K-12 Educational System
Abstract : A combination of both man-made and natural disasters in recent years has revitalized the concept of civil preparedness and defense in the United States. During the State of the Union Address in 2002, President George W. Bush announced the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Citizen Corps, a component of the USA Freedom Corps initiative developed shortly after 9/11. Additionally, FEMA launched the "Are You Ready?" campaign to provide individuals, families, and communities with in-depth preparedness information and training, and the American Red Cross developed its own educational disaster preparedness program designed to coincide with the daily threat level. While the various programs include several common themes, including a special emphasis on disaster preparedness for children, they lack promotion, visibility, standardization, and coordination. Empowering children to lead change by teaching families and other citizens is one possible methodology to enhance visibility and inspire participation in such programs. This thesis examines the pros and cons of historical and current citizen preparedness campaigns and K-12 preparedness curricula, other countries' approaches to citizen preparedness, elements of successful preparedness programs, Homeland Security stakeholder benefits of preparedness programs for children, and potential arguments against the implementation of such programs. The author concludes the thesis with criteria for a successful K-12 civil preparedness curriculum.
Living with Natural Hazards on the Icelandic South Coast
17 Introduction 18 1 Vulnerability, resilience and adaptation 20 2 The study area 23 2.1 The Stokkseyri community 23 2.1.1 Present day 26 2.2 Stokkseyri physical environment 27 2.2.1 Natural hazards and emergency plans 29 3 Methods 32 3.1 Focus group and in-depth interviews 32 3.2 Data processing 33 4 Results 35 4.1 Natural hazards 35 4.2 Community 42 5 Discussion 45 5.1 Natural hazards and risk perception 45 5.2 Community change 49 6 Conclusions 52 References 53
Inquiring "Tree of Life" at Home: Persian Classic Literature in English Classes.
The recent decades of English Language Teaching (ELT) appear to be particularly concerned with the marginalisation caused by English linguistic, cultural, and academic colonisation and imperialism. Bold footprints of this academic monopoly can be seen in the wide incorporation of abridged or unabridged British and American literary works in foreign language settings. Such literary products are often legitimised as authentic materials authored by native speakers. Inspired by the idea of incorporating non-native literature and translated first language literature into English classes, the authors of this article sought to explore the possibilities of opening spaces for English translations of Persian classic works of literature in English as foreign language classrooms and tracing the language events that unfolded as a result of incorporating such literature. The participants of this two-semester long action research project were non-English major Iranian female university students, majoring in various fields at Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran. The sense of familiarity the students had with such national literary works led to the emergence of language instances lightened by sparks of virtue, vision, life and art.