Inspired by a universal call-to-action from the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) within the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the Smithsonian Science Education Center (SSEC), in conjunction with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and other organizations, is bringing together a global team to design inclusive and equitable research-based science education.
Working together, the team has developed a first educational curriculum module: Mosquito!, freely available to the public in several languages. This module effectively promotes excellence within science education while fostering pioneering approaches to empower and unite educators around the world.
The first module addresses the problem of diseases transmitted by mosquitos from an educational point of view. It is aimed at children between eight and 18 years of age and their teachers. For more information on the Spanish module, please follow this link https://ssec.si.edu/mosquito-espanol.
Thanks to support from Panama’s National Secretariat of Science, Technology and Innovation (SENACYT) and Panama’s Ministry of Education (MEDUCA), as well as financial support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Johnson & Johnson, STRI and the SSEC brought together a group of change agents and more than fifty teachers to try out the content of the module, interacting with world-class scientists using innovative teaching methods.
The objective was to support Panamanian teachers as they explored 45 areas of the curriculum that makes up the Mosquito! module and to provide free resources for use in classrooms and in a community context.
