Botswana educators learn AIDS curriculum

But Botswana educators are using lessons created with help from the Newton-based Education Development Center Inc. to educate students across the country about the deadly disease. Earlier this fall, a group of the educators visited EDC and worked on developing a K-12 HIV prevention curriculum geared specifically toward their country's students.

While most schools have HIV prevention on the syllabus, many teachers have no curriculum to guide them, relying instead on public health brochures, said Lydia Seeletso of the BOTUSA Project, which helped spearhead the effort.

A collaboration between the Botswana government and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, BOTUSA first noted that most Botswana students glean most of their information about AIDS from the radio, friends, and the health clinic.

"Why is it that children don't get their information from school?" Seeletso and her BOTUSA colleagues wondered.

The new curriculum aims to rectify that situation, drawing upon EDC's expertise at teaching public health in general. Merely imparting knowledge is not sufficient, said EDC project director Scott Pulizzi; classes must also teach students how to make wise decisions about their health.

The curriculum offers age-appropriate lessons for first- through 12th-graders. First-graders, for instance, may be too young to learn about safe sex, but they can learn about the risk of handling blood or touching an open wound, Seeletso said. Other sections focus on helping students reduce risk of injury and disease in myriad other ways, discussing alcohol abuse, physical fighting, even the need to look both ways when you cross the street. "If you build up a person who knows about all these things, it will help with all other types of disease," Seeletso said.

After three weeks in the United States, the Botswanan educators returned to their home country with a working draft of the curriculum. They planned to pilot it in 43 schools.

At each stage, the curriculum aims to instill attitudes in its young audience that will help them resist making poor health decisions in their lives. Lessons teach them to have self-awareness, establish values, and set goals.

While the curriculum has been somewhat tailored to the Botswanan culture -- with sayings and characters to appeal to schoolchildren of that country -- it's also readily translatable for other countries, Pulizzi and Seeletso agreed.

One recurring theme in the Botswanan curriculum is that of "botho," a concept tied to the country's Vision 2016, propagated by the government. "It's a concept of a nation that is caring, has self-respect, and is a loving and educated nation," Seeletso said.