Educational material for CARIFORUM teachers now available
On 20 February, the CarIPI project met online with CARIFORUM IP Offices and Ministries of Education to present the results of the ‘Creativity and IP in Schools’ project and to introduce the materials for teachers and students based on the EUIPO’s IdeasPowered@school project and adapted to the Caribbean context.
This activity began in 2022 and since its inception, several consultations have been held with stakeholders and focus groups to develop a regional strategy to help introduce the concepts of ‘Creativity and IP’ in primary and secondary schools across the CARIFORUM region.
Last year, a series of online ‘sensitisation’ meetings were organised with teachers from Antigua and Barbuda to show how IP principles can be incorporated into the classroom. CarIPI also organised a webinar series of ‘train the trainer’ courses for primary and secondary school teachers from Antigua and Barbuda, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. In both workshops, experts discussed pedagogical methods for teaching students about intellectual property.
All the sessions included an overview of the IdeasPowered@School materials created by the EUIPO, a handful of which were selected and adapted to the Caribbean context to facilitate teaching students about the benefits of intellectual property in their daily lives. The materials will be made available to the IP offices and participating schools.
Including IP in school curricula is expected to increase the positive perception of how IP rights can be used to create value and improve livelihoods in all sectors of the economy.