As Government schools use this month to highlight various aspects of tourism, the Education Department is working to ensure that emphasis be continued under a restructured curriculum this September. According to Helen Stemler, curriculum co-ordinator for restructuring with the Department of Education, departmental meetings have already taken place to ascertain what is and what is not being done by the system to educate students on the subject. "Several months ago there was a significant and important meeting with chief education officer, Joseph Christopher and (Tourism director) Gary Philips during which they presented information to selected education officers in the Ministry of Education at which time they historically reviewed what the school system has, and has not done to support an emphasis on tourism in the schools,'' she said.

"To prepare for that meeting, Education Officers assigned to Social Studies, Business Studies and Family Studies brought copies, and analysed existing curriculum documents, making recommendations for what would be needed to expand an emphasis on tourism education.'' It was only last summer that tourism representatives and educators converged at the Bermuda College to infuse fresh ideas into the upcoming middle school curriculum. Along with Mr.

Phillips and members of the VIP, representatives of Stonington Beach Hotel, Southampton Princess, Mermaid Beach, Clearview Guest House, the Bermuda Hotel Association, and the Education Department came up with more than 40 suggestions on how tourism could best be linked with the school curriculum.

According to Dr. Stemler, it was suggested that students could: Study the economic impact of tourism on the Island, and "follow the dollar'', even if only in a very simple way for the younger students Give input about their experiences abroad and explain how they like to be treated and what they like to see while on vacation Show the impact on society if airlines stopped flying in to Bermuda for an extended period of time Explore science and eco-tourism Help write advertisements for tourism and interview visitors Learn about the Bermuda Industrial Union and its interaction with the rest of the work place Be encouraged to compose songs, create art and dances about Bermuda.

Chairman of the VIP, E. Michael Jones stressed that Bermuda needed bright, young people to enter the tourism industry.

"When I was young, people encouraged you to be a doctor, or a lawyer and said you didn't need to be in the tourism industry,'' Mr. Jones recalled. "Young people need to realise that our whole economy hinges on tourism, and we need to make them more involved, aware, and keen over the next few years.'' Mr. Phillips expressed a similar sentiment: "There needs to be a total attitudinal shift in the respect of tourism for the industry,'' he said.

"Even if you are not physically in the business, it affects everyone on the Island.'' And at the time, Dr. Stemler pointed out that the curriculum needed to be "more Bermudianised and multicultural''.

"Bermudianisation of the curriculum seeks to ensure that wherever possible, Kids are interested in tourism consideration of Bermudian practices or role models,'' she explained at the time. "When planning the new curriculum we use a distinct philosophy. Firstly we consider the subject and what exactly will it offer to young people, what the community wants of our young people, that is, the politicians, the clergy, and the parents, and what the children are interested in learning.'' At the end of the session, Bermudian college students Rochelle Simon, studying pre-med at Florida State University, and Michelle Squire, studying at The University of Virginia for her doctorate in education, presented results of a tourism survey they carried out on ten-year-old students. When asked why they should know more about the tourism industry, most of the students said because it was Bermuda's main industry. Other reasons given by the students included so that they could answer visitors' questions; because they should know more about their Island and because they might get a job in the industry. As a result of the information received, Dr. Stemler added, educators in the Ministry of Education in collaboration with the Visitor Industry Partnership (VIP), formed a sub-committee known as the Visitor Industry Education Partnership (VIEP). "As we set upon restructuring the curriculum, we decided we needed a five-pronged approach to enhancing this emphasis,'' said Dr.

Stemler. "And it was the VIEP which identified and micro-managed the planning process to affect this expanded emphasis. We decided that we had to do these five things, that the Ministry of Education, over the next two or three years, would support the infusion of the Visitor Industry Programme into the restructured curriculum. "This includes tourism, but is not limited to tourism. Maybe that's because of the expanded connotation of visitors to include international business leaders as well as families and friends of Bermudians who are coming to visit on a well-earned vacation, that we now see tourism as a major component of the bigger umbrella -- visitor industry education, and we're beginning to have a shift in our jargon.'' Dr. Stemler said students also contributed to the planned restructuring through a survey conducted on Primary Six students. "As a result, we found what they wanted to know about the visitor industry and tourism industry and this year, the (Middleschool 1) teachers, formerly called P7, are approaching, in an integrated curriculum fashion, to bring this alive in the classroom. For example, in Primary Five, when we teach civics, there is now a major emphasis on citizenship responsibility which included being pleasant and supportive of tourists while they're here in Bermuda. And we've had tremendous feedback from MM1 teachers, the pilot year middle school, about significantly enhanced student interest in this whole visitor industry. "Many of them are already talking about career opportunities. Part of infusing the visitor industry properly into our restructured curriculum is to make sure that as we develop our brand new middle school libraries, we use resources in vertical files along our library shelf that young people can go look at whenever they have an interest in the issue of tourism, even those that are not being directly taught. So libraries at each of our schools, beginning next September at Cedarbridge Academy, will be the hub of the school programmatically and philosophically and will really serve as tourism and visitor industry resource centres.'' To help forward this goal, said Dr. Stemler, the department is relying on the Bermuda International Business Association (BIBA), the Chamber of Commerce and the Department of Tourism to keep updating materials in the libraries. "This is, in fact, more important with technological applications.

Certainly all the types of things that support tourism on the internet will be used as young people develop these library acquisition skills, acquire and manage information, and perhaps have their own web pages so that we can do something to promote tourism in Bermuda. We not only want the young people of Cedarbridge Academy to next year acquire and manage information when they're doing research on a paper but we want them to create their own media. "Our young people will be able to access information from the internet utilising existing software CD Rom print information from laser discs, and actually package their own marketing material for tourism education. And this will support our purposes of marketing the business studies curriculum.'' The second prong of the five-prong approach, Dr. Stemler said, is to acquire and use meaningful and appropriate materials of instruction, whether they be print, non-print, electronic or multimedia materials, as a means of enhancing tourism education. "We also feel we need to package pre-made learning activity packets for children. It's hard for teachers from every one of our five future middle schools to be going to all these departments on their own time at night when they've taught all day. Thus in the Spring we are going to be making kits for all future M1 students. There will be a lot of accessible tourism and visitor industry information and we'll be working closely with those four groups -- the Department of Tourism, the Visitor Industry Partnership, BIBA and the Chamber of Commerce, to make sure we have these packets. Especially since the textbooks available on tourism and the hospitality industry are, number one, generally written for college students and used in the Bermuda College programme, and number two, are non-Bermudian in nature.'' The third prong requests that the VIP look at enhanced applications of technology to educate schools about the visitor industry and encourage people to visit the Island, she said. And so far, young people seem particularly excited about the application of technology in that manner. "The fourth prong relates to the need, not only for good instructional materials, but for meaningful staff development. You can't ask Bermudian teachers to teach all kinds of new things in new and different ways with instructional strategies unless you give them professional staff development. Thus to support tourism education and the written curriculum's integrated approach, we will be redeploying teachers and assigning them to middle schools and/or Cedarbridge Academy by late March or early April. Once assigned, (those teachers) will undergo a series of many types of staff development initiatives. "After several days of induction training, they will...look for opportunities to infuse lessons in mathematics, science, social studies, language arts, business -- subjects across the curriculum, that will support visitor industry including tourism education. So the teachers will actually develop the (tourism education) plan that they will use next Fall -- when and how they will do it; who they will use as speakers, what time of the day they're going to do it; how many lessons are they going to do and so on.'' One Integration key for teachers to use building level planning and site-based decision making as an integrated team. "That's very significant. Up to this point in time, teachers have operated in isolation and students haven't seen a transfer in learning from one subject to another. In mathematics class they saw the chart but they never understood how that related to the future of Bermuda's business or to our civic responsibility to be polite to the tourist on the streets. Now we can integrate this and integrate time and not have bells between periods so that learning can be transferred among subjects, can be looked at in greater depth and conducted at an increased rate for young people to achieve.'' As a bonus, she said, the Department plans to develop over the next few years, more of an innovative approach to visitor industry education, an emphasis which will see greater staff development. "It will particularly be seen in looking at our technological acquisitions as we work more closely with the VIP.

"Education research over the last five years across the world has taught us several things,'' she said. "At many test sites we see that electronic access to primary documents from Government departments motivates children in upper primary as well as in middle and senior schools to search further; not only electronically, but in books; to answer the questions that they ask when they get involved in the types of things they call up on computers. We think that's really important. We don't only want to jump on the bandwagon of technology with what we're doing about the visitor industry. We see technology as a tool to continue to interest young people in their own literacy development.'' Perhaps one of the most important prongs, is the fifth which deals with teacher evaluation of the entire process. "We teach a lot about tourism, but how do we know the students are learning?'' she said. "Therefore, it's going to be very important that we take our established written goals and outcome in the written curriculum and monitor what is taught as well as the most important part, that the students do learn. "That should be an ongoing process which we feel could see greater benefits through VIP support; especially if it were to co-operate with management services, the statistics department, Government's computer people and the Department in designing and implementing a system for monitoring and programme evaluation of both the process of teaching and learning, and the product of student achievement. This is very significant because what it does is take programme evaluation (away from) only the Department of Education and puts it so that we are collaborating with the VIP and other branches of Bermuda Government who have a vested interest in this issue, such as the Department of Tourism. This way we will actually be able to look at trend analysis in terms of the knowledge and attitude that young people have towards tourism and the visitor industry.'' month. EDUCATION MONTH ED