Malala inspires school curriculum
The 16-year-old Pakistani teenager targeted for a Taliban assassination because she championed education for girls has inspired the development of a US school curriculum encouraging advocacy.
George Washington University in Washington DC announced today that faculty members are creating multimedia curriculum tools to accompany a book recently published by Malala Yousafzai.
Several faculty members will pilot the curriculum early next year for both college and high school instruction. Free of charge, it will focus on themes such as the importance of a woman's voice and political extremism, the university said.
The tools will not just look at the teenager's story, but also how the same issues get reflected elsewhere, such as when girls face child marriage and pressures to leave school, said Mary Ellsberg, director of the university's Global Women's Institute.
"It's going to be really interactive and really encourage students to do ... activities outside of school, it will encourage them to get engaged in the communities and as well to help the Malala Fund directly," she said.
The university's Global Women's Institute is working with the Malala Fund, a non-profit organisation that seeks to ensure girls around the world have access to education.
In 2012 a Taliban gunman walked up to a bus taking children home from school in Pakistan's volatile northern Swat Valley and shot Malala in the head and neck. Another girl on the bus was also wounded.
Malala now lives in Britain, where she was flown for medical care. Her memoir is I Am Malala.