El Niño: Phenomenon of Opportunities
This external teaching resource aims to provide geography teachers (and students) with a highly nuanced and contextualised occurrence of disasters by looking at the lived realities of the El Niño phenomenon in the Sechura desert in northern Peru. It is a collaboration between the Society and the University of St Andrews and it has been developed from an AHRC interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral research project titled ‘El Niño: Phenomenon of Opportunities’. It uses a range of data collection methods and sources to reflect the diverse nature of geography as a discipline.
The resource is underpinned by the research project and the educational programme that took place at Daniel Alcides Carrión school, in Mala Vida, where students developed a collection of videos, stories, and images to communicate the benefits of the El Niño phenomenon in the Sechura desert – a vast repertoire of knowledge on which this teaching resource is based.
It has been developed for use with 16-to-18-year-old students. However, aspects of the resource could be used in other ways (e.g. the sources could be used for an independent research project. Spanish language teachers may find it useful too).