Philipsburg:---Last week a number of teachers from the primary as well as the secondary schools along with members of the HIV/AIDS Education Policy Workgroup attended the re-scheduled Curriculum Development Workshop. The workshop was initially held in October, but due to the passing of Hurricane Omar it had to be re-scheduled to January.
The Curriculum Development Workshop was held on Thursday, January 22 and Friday January 23 at the UTS Training & Development Center, and it was facilitated by Salorne McDonald a Behavior Change Communications Specialist with a degree in education specialization in curriculum development.
During the two day workshop attendees were engaged in interactive activities all surrounding the topics of: curriculum & syllabus development; needs assessment & content derivation; skills building components & message analysis; curriculum streaming and spiraling; integration and adaption along with other topics.
These workshops are part of the preparation for the development of the HIV/AIDS Education Policy that will be implemented into the schools' curriculum from the 2009-2010 academic terms. The need for an HIV/AIDS Education Policy came out of the 2007-2011 HIV/AIDS Strategic Plan.
Suzette Moses-Burton, HIV/AIDS Programme Manager stated, "We are pleased to be moving into this phase of the HIV/AIDS Education Policy development. It has been a long road, and the journey to reach our goal is some distance away. So far we have completed the data collection from the surveys which were administered with all the relevant stakeholders, including parents, teachers, management and of course the students themselves.
Although the data is still being analyzed we already have a fairly good indication of the direction in which we should be heading with this policy and so we have been able to move forward with the next phase of actually developing the curriculum. Once this has been done, both the draft curriculum as well as the draft policy will be presented to the stakeholders for their review and comment before finalization. The next big item before the policy implementation will be the training of the teachers. So far the process has been moving well and we are pleased with the progress being made."
