Observations and recommendations related to the summer workshop on population and environmental education

Given these alarming statistics, the Egyptian Ministry of Education (MOE) began yearly workshops in 1977 to provide an orientation in population and environmental education (P&EE) to enable Egyptian teachers to introduce modern methods and materials in these subjects in the school system. In October 1980 the MOE initiated a year-long correspondence course in population studies to prepare participants for the 1981 workshop, the subject of this report. The workshop's agenda focused on using a large number of nontraditional teaching methods (e.g., brainstorming, problem-solving, role-playing, etc.) to treat the six subject areas (key population concepts, influences on population growth, Egyptian and world population problems and policies, physiology of reproduction, and population planning); and on evaluating participants' performance in the correspondence course and at the workshop, as well as their attitudes (through pre- and post-test surveys) towards P&EE issues and specific teaching methods. Based on their observations, the U.S. consulting team prepared a list of recommendations. These included that: the MOE form subject area P&EE teams to identify and develop curricula and teacher guides with emphasis on teaching method rather than population theory; separate trainer-of-trainer workshops for each discipline be held to prepare a number of participants from each geographical district to lead local P&EE workshops funded by MOE; outside lectures on physiology of reproduction and other subjects not directly related to developing local workshops be reduced or omitted; the MOE consider reducing the number of topics into which P&EE is integrated in order to achieve large-scale training more quickly in a few disciplines; the high priority of P&EE be reflected in national student examinations; and that special attention be given to attitudinal reorientation toward population-related issues such as women's rights, male involvement in and religious or traditional barriers to family planning, sex education, contraception, and Egypt's population policy. Appendixes detail the workshop's agenda and materials and include an 18-item list of references (1975-80).