| المستخلص: |
Fire safety education is a cornerstone for preventing injuries and deaths, and for minimizing losses due to property damage as the result of fire and smoke. Children fire play in Jordan is the leading unintentional cause of fires, and the second unintentional cause of residential fires, for that reason it is important to have a well-structured fire safety education program, that is, age-appropriate, comprehensive, and effective. The objective of this education program is to control and intervene the problem involving fire and children, namely "juvenile fire setting" problem. Adopting such education help in increasing the level of fire safety knowledge, understanding, and skills among schools’ students; as a result, minimizing the number of fires incidents, injuries, deaths, and losses related to fires caused by children. Textbooks from all the curriculum of the national school program were evaluated and examined, and then fire safety components were identified, tabulated by school-grade, and benchmarked with internationally recognized safety education programs, in order to identify strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in the Jordanian curriculum. These recognized programs were developed by; London Fire Brigade (LFB), Office of State Fire Marshal (OSFM) in Oregon, County Fire Authority (CFA) in Australia, and Learn Not To Burn (LNTB). Besides, age-specific questionnaires have been conducted, to measure the change in the level of fire safety knowledge, before and after a presentation, the percentage score was 39.9% before presentation, while it was 75% after presentation; these results indicated that, current Jordan Curricula (JC) need to be developed and improved, regarding fire safety knowledge and skills. Furthermore, feedbacks forms completed by teachers; after interviews regarding this curriculum, they emphasized and supported the need of such education curriculum in Jordan. Results of this research showed clear knowledge gaps in the Jordanian curricula, these gaps described as; lack in fire safety knowledge and skills, absence of addressing juvenile fire setting problem, weakness in organizing current fire safety information, age-knowledge inappropriateness, and no effectively and continually enough discussion for current fire safety information. The suggested curriculum discusses the fire safety knowledge, understanding and skills, and addresses the problem of juvenile fire setting, through introducing 111 fire safety messages and activities; that were selected from four fire safety programs, and organized based on the Fire Safety Trailer Curriculum which was developed by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in United States (CDC) and United States Fire Administration (USFA). This research recommends the resulted curriculum for Jordan schools, to cover age groups from four years to eighteen years old students.
|
