Road Safety Curriculum Workshop Held in Belize City…
The Road Safety Program today held a teacher training curriculum workshop at the ITVET. The idea is to develop a road safety curriculum that could be integrated into social studies and health and family life education for youths to be informed about some of the small things that can be done to be safe in Belize. Various stakeholders, including transport officers, teachers, law enforcement officers and education officials were trained in road safety measures under the Road Safety Corridor Project. The project, funded by the government through the Caribbean Development Bank, focuses on safety along the George Price Highway between Belize City and Belmopan including infrastructure and awareness. According to Curriculum Consultancy Team Leader, Darren Divall, the goal is to create a lesson plan that can be incorporated into the education system.
Darren Divall, Curriculum Consultancy Team Leader, Road Safety Project
Darren Divall
“We’ve decided where road safety fits into it so we’ve developed a curriculum for them, we’ve developed some example materials for them…things like worksheets, games, quizzes, songs, but also we’ve developed some lesson plans for them also that they can use in the classrooms as well. But today, it is all about imparting that knowledge that we’ve developed with them cause this hasn’t been something that we’ve come and developed and said this must be with you. we’ve held workshops with teachers who have contributed to the development of the resources and impart that knowledge on to them in how to deliver effect road safety education in the classroom to the students. Students in schools are the future of Belize; they are the country’s future and we need to make sure that that generation of students are equipped with the skills and knowledge and understanding of using the road, whatever form that is, to do that safely, understand the dangers behind that, the consequences of the road crashes so that the next generation of road users are safer and then they can impart their knowledge of road safety on the generation after that. This workshop today will last just today, but there have actually been five workshops prior to this which we’ve been doing since May. The follow up to this now is that we will finalize all of the documents, all of the guidelines, all of the materials and resources and we will get them out to the schools along this project highway as quickly as we can. We hope that there will be a pilot project just to test in the real scenario everything that has been developed, we will evaluate that and hopefully across Belize this will be implemented from there.”
