by Darlene Monkman

Contemporary environmental issues are reported in daily news broadcasts. The story may relate to deforestation, acid rain, ozone depletion, species extinction, resource depletion, global warming, world hunger or air, water, and noise pollution. Population dynamics are behind many of today s headlines. Population studies can help students to understand current issues. "They learn not only about the social, political and environmental impacts of population growth and change, but more importantly, how their own personal decisions collectively determine the quality of life in tomorrow's world" (Wasserman, 1996, p. 438).

The goal of my project is to develop and present an awareness level workshop to interested educators in order to facilitate the integration of the population component of their respective courses as outlined in the British Columbia Ministry of Education Integrated Resource Packages (IRP s). The workshop will give educators learning activities and resource materials to help their students learn more about population topics in the classroom. They will learn how population and environment trends are interrelated in order to help prepare the next generation for responsible global citizenship in the twenty-first century. I was recently involved in presenting a mini-workshop to my school staff on global education (1.5 hours). Staff responded very positively to the ideas that they received and many were surprised by the diverse ways that global education can integrated into the curriculum. Several teachers expressed an interest in exploring the topic further and everyone agreed that it is an important issue.

This is an applied research (Charles, 1995) project in which I am going to develop a workshop that will enhance the teaching of population related issues. I will be using a qualitative approach. I will use the feedback from interviews with teachers in order to prepare my workshop and my evaluation questionnaire. I plan to videotape the workshop in order to be able to use it for some "interaction analysis" (Jordan and Henderson, 1995) for reconstruction of the workshop. I can refer to it and to study the reactions and interaction of the participants. I will also use a questionnaire based on the feedback from disinterested peers and the traditional questionnaire (Roth, 1994) model which uses a combination of positively and negatively worded questions.

In order to establish credibility (Guba and Lincoln, 1989) I will be incorporating disinterested peers to give me feedback about what they are doing in their classes to teach population issues. I will be using persistent observation is so far that I am going to video tape my workshop. I will be using peer evaluation from the participants in my study.