EDU401 Quiz 4

Lesson No.29 RELEVANCE AND PARTICIPATION · Topic 136 · Relevance and Participation

Relevance is the raison d’etre of population education. Its goal is to improve learners’ and nations’ abilities to deal effectively with population issues. This is a most practical concern. The challenge facing population educators is to ensure that, in translating this goal into action, the program retains its focus on the needs of the learners, their families, communities and societies. Furthermore, there is an increasing recognition that learners need to participate more in the various planning and implementation stages of population education programs but, in most cases their participation is still more spoken of than practiced. In the absence of mass participation in preprogram activities, who can stand in for the learners? How does the educator avoid imposing his perception of need on them? Can efforts to increase learners’ participation at the local level be generalized when programs are being designed for provinces/states and regions within countries or when a national program is being planned.

Topic 137

Program Planning/ Implementation

Formal education systems in the developing world and in most industrialized nations are financed and directed largely from the national center. Deciding how these systems can be responsive to the needs of learners in different parts of the country, in different racial and ethnic groups, in different social and economic classes is another problem for population educators. The academic organization of schools has not always been sufficiently in tune with these differences, and this has contributed to the recent disillusionment over schooling in many parts of the world. Nationally-directed out-of-school programs are also likely to face the same problem unless special efforts are made to localize their activities. Decentralization, in both school and out-of-school programs, of teacher training, of program planning, of curriculum and material development is usually difficult to achieve because of the large-scale programs and the usual shortages of resources.

Topic 138

Future Oriented learning

In school programs, many of the population related decisions likely to be considered are those that will be made in the future: where to live, when and if to marry, when and if to have children and so on. Even out-of-school programs for adults educate for future decisions, although this future may not be distant as it is for many school children. In addition, the repercussions of these decisions may be spread over a number of years. This presents special problems for population educators, because the situation may change between the end of the educational process and the time for decision. This raises the problem of how best to train for an unknown future, how to reinforce the learning process so that the content will be better retained, how to emphasize the process of finding solutions rather than the solutions themselves. Viewing population education in a lifelong context emphasizes the importance of further development for both school and out-of-school programs and the need to link these efforts through all available educational settings and channels. But the linking together of the various parts of the total educational and learning system of a society --- school and out-of-school ---- is quite a complex enterprise, still in the first steps of its development.

Topic 139

No education system, anywhere in world is free from some degree of persuasion and prescription, despite the theoretical commitment to truth telling. Training for citizenship and developing the sense of being part of a nation usually involves elements of conditioning. Furthermore, no educational process can be totally value free, because any selection of facts involves conscious and unconscious value choices. Population education faces these general problems and is also potentially confronted with a more direct conflict between theory and practice: the degree to which the educational system can or should directly support the population policies of the nation. If the government has determined that the small family shall be the norm, or that migration must take place in order to relieve dense population, or that country's population should increase, what is the proper and possible role of the educational system?

Topic 140

Should the system adopt these prescriptions as educational goals? Or should it assume a valuefair stance in which various points of view are examined (even though some may have more weight than others) and the decision left to the learners? Obviously, such a statement of issues is overly simplistic but it helps to focus on one of the key issues facing the population educator in planning and implementing his program. And even if it is decided that a prescriptive approach is necessary (either because of the severity of a population situation because government policy would not permit otherwise), the efficacy of prescription is, in certain circumstances, questionable.

Lesson No.30 POPULATION STUDIES · Topic 141 · Population Studies

Population education is not an attempt to develop a new discipline. Although demography and folk demography form the core of knowledge needed for population education, they do not cover the whole range of issues involved. Facts, theories and concepts from a broad spectrum of academic disciplines and professional fields are needed to help individuals and societies fully understand population interactions and thus the effect of population factors on the quality of their individual and collective lives. The sum of this knowledge is referred to as population studies. These studies raise a number of issues. Since the potential sources of information are vast, and since culture and ideology, among other things, will play a large role in determining what is most relevant to the needs of any particular group, there Is no agreement on what should or should not be included. Various factors and assumptions act as filters in determining the priority given to areas of knowledge and the framework used to organize the knowledge selected for inclusion. Unfortunately, much of what is known deals with larger population units, making it difficult to extrapolate findings that can be applied to smaller units, like the community, the family and the individual. This encourages the generalized belief that population education deals primarily with national or global concerns, whereas in reality, the problem is caused by the inadequacy of available data.

Topic 142

Methodological issues

The emphasis on relevance, decision-making and future orientation raises questions concerning the methods to be used in population education activities: are certain methods particularly suited to population education? Intuitively, it might be suggested that methods which emphasize learner participation and practice of various skills would achieve the results desired by the population educator. For example, it seems that effective decision making can best be learned through a process which actually involves the making of decisions. However, little evidence exists to support or refute this contention. There are also problems of reinforcement and transfer of learning from one context to another. Methodological issues also concern effectiveness of different ways of adding population education to the school curriculum ----- whether it should be integrated with other materials or given separate courses ---- and the way it is related to out-of-school programs.

Topic 143

Population Education/Other “Educations”

A number of other educational activities share some of the content associated with population education. The greatest confusion that arises concerns population education’s relation to sex education, family life education, environmental education and development education. Differences in goals and objectives give population education a separate identity at the present stage of its development. However, future developments may bring interests closer together and blur present dividing lines.

Topic 144

Population Education and the Media

Concerns about population issues has stimulated activities among people working in the field of information and communication, just as it has stimulated educators. These activities are potentially mutually supporting. Educators certainly need to know what the communicators are doing since informal learning through various media has an impact on the learning that takes place in school and out-of-school settings. However, these activities have differences: first, the educator is concerned essentially with a continuous process of interaction between learners and teachers. Although communication media can be of considerable use to the educator, the media specialist has so far been primarily involved in a process of transmitting information. Second, much of work in communication has tended to be heavily prescriptive, urging support for particular decisions rather than exploring the consequences of these decisions. In particular, most although not all information and motivation activities have been aimed at supporting family-planning activities and at decreasing family size ---- aims which, as has been stressed, are not necessarily those of population education.

Lesson No.31 RESEARCH FOR PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT · Topic 145 · Research for Program Development

Although it is recognized that program development cannot always wait for research results, it is equally clear that a broader research agenda needs to be initiated now so that future programs can be planned more rationally and systematically. Systematic research – investigations that might survey, for example the relevant literature concerning the nature of the learner and his learning context Basic research – studies that might indicate, for example how learners acquire population related concepts in a variety of settings. Program research – investigation that might establish, for example the comparative efficiency of different strategies in reaching particular audiences The continued absence of research findings in these areas appears to be one of the major barriers to the further progress in the conceptual and methodological development of population education