Population Europe has developed four lesson plans for teachers to help educate their students about demography. The teaching material has been tested with various school classes to make sure that the materials were easy to understand and interesting for both students and teachers without the need for extensive preparation.
Each lesson incorporates material from the app "A Life Journey" to provide students the opportunity to use an interactive tool in the classroom to learn about a field of study that has a growing importance in their lives.
The main objective of the app “A Life Journey” is to give everyone the opportunity to learn about population and demographic change, focusing on our shared experience: The European one.
With the creation of these school materials, we strive to reach school audiences and offer students some basic demographic scientific knowledge that would allow them to acquire skills to understand, question and discuss current social phenomenon and “problems” that may affect their life courses today and in the future.
These lesson plans are available to download for free and to use in the classroom. Currently, they are only available in German, but we are working closely with our partner institutes to be able to soon offer them in other languages.
Available lessons:
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the students and teachers at the Ostendorfer Gymnasium in Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, Germany, and at the Erasmus Gymnasium in Rostock, Germany for participating in the test phase of this material. Their assistance and feedback helped us to improve and adapt the lesson plans.
Funding
We also want to thank the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Berlin / Bonn; the European Commission, Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, Brussels; the Economic and Social Research Council, Swindon; the Friede Springer Foundation, Berlin; the Allianz SE, Munich / Berlin; and, the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science for their financial support of this project.