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I am a (science) education researcher and look at most things in the world through the lens of education. On disaster (or anything else), the questions I ask are - e.g., why should we teach about it? What should we teach about it, and how? How can we support teachers to teach about disasters in their classrooms? My training in educational research has equipped me with the theories, tools and methods that can be utilised to approach these questions. I am hoping that these knowledge, experiences and skills can cross-fertilise with EcoGovLab's expertise in anthropology, SPS and environmental governance.

Our Purpose

One of our greatest responsibilities is to prepare the next generation to meet the challenges they will face in the 21st Century, with a deep commitment to the rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship. We have a unique opportunity for a community dialogue about the civic values, knowledge, and skills that K-12 students should learn and practice in our public school system. We will create strong community support for our schools to provide effective civic education for students to be successful in college, career and citizenship.

OUR MISSION

The mission of the Civic Education Center is to restore civility in America by creating opportunities for youth to learn and practice civic values and democratic skills.

About Us – Civic Ed Center

Civic Education Center | Fresno CA | Facebook

Goals

• Teach the vision of the Founders and the triumphs and tragedies of our history.
• Teach civil dialogue on controversial issues and democratic deliberation.
• Integrate science, technology, literature, media, arts and math with civic projects.
• To promote teacher understanding of connections with the State Seal of Civic Engagement, Social Emotional Learning, and Ethnic Studies.

Summer Institute – Civic Ed Center

The Mission of CV YEA is "Our mission is to fight environmental injustices in the Central Valley through connecting like-minded individuals". 

CV YEA is based in Fresno, CA and led by Executive Director Kamryn Kubose (interview), who we met during our visit to Golden Charter Academy. CV YEA takes part in Clean Vehicle Empowerment Collaborative. The board consists of master's students and environmental activists based in California.

• The article referenced the Congo Republic’s Civil War as an incident responsible for a significant amount of sexual violence, I looked into the conditions there for non-military citizens in order to better understand the significance of government in public health.
• While looking into the history of Congo the issues of neutrality for organizations such as the Red Cross, the idea being that if humanitarian aid organizations do not provide an advantage for either side of a conflict they will be allowed to provide aid to more individuals. This has proven quite effective but does often mean that aid workers are left mostly undefended in areas of conflict as neither side will protect them from the other.
• Finally, I looked into the statistics of rape worldwide which showed not only that rape is still highly prevalent in all cultures but also that the reporting rates for rape are inaccurate in many countries without significant health infrastructure or a government interest in preventing or aiding survivors of sexual violence. 

The argument is made using footage from the events occurring in Monrovia during the Ebola outbreak and subsequent months, which allows for the audience to truly understand the difficulties and horrors caused by disease. The film did not include much scientific data on the virus, only stating that 11,000 people had died and over twice that many had contracted the virus. Due to the public awareness of the Ebola epidemic, as it occurred so recently, and the graphic footage included, the film invokes feelings of horror and sadness for the many who couldn’t be helped.

• “Despite the urgency and impact of violence affecting health service delivery, there is an overall lack of research that is of health-specific, publically accessible and comparable, as well as a lack of gender-disaggregated data and data on perpetrator motives.”
• “Conclusions on violence in the healthcare setting are limited and it is difficult to examine whether or not certain sectors of aid work, such as health, are more dangerous than others. This has consequences for analyzing the drivers of violence. Within humanitarian communities and the media, and, to a lesser extent, within some sectors of academia, portrayals of violence directly affecting health service delivery in complex security environments often accentuate nebulous, macro-level factors such as the ‘shrinking humanitarian space,’”
• “increased collaboration in data collection and data sharing is essential, both between academics, human rights NGOs and organizations delivering health services and among representatives of the latter group. As part of this, aid organizations could do more to make their anonymized data public in order to support global responses on prevention and accountability”

Emergency response is not addressed in terms of the immediate response. The article focuses instead on the aftermath of the incident on Sept. 11th, dealing primarily with the cleanup efforts and investigation that followed in an effort to provide closure to the public and resume the regular business of the city, both important steps in recovering from a disaster.

The article has not been referenced extensively, as it is focused on a very specific topic. However the ideas presented in the article, and by extension the ideas presented in the book have been included in other papers including some of the author's later works.