In this National Geographic lesson, students will analyze demographic data and explore relationships between several cultural characteristics of nations. A key component of the lesson is examining health statistics including maternal health to draw conclusions about developed, undeveloped, and underdeveloped countries.
This lesson provides some excellent country profiles that include maternal mortality rate, fertility rate, and other statistics related to the status of women in other cultures. The lesson plan eventually reveals the actual countries and through further research, the students need to draw conclusions about the nations such as "Countries that have high total fertility rates and high maternal mortality rates will tend to have poor health care."
The lesson provides the background and the activities that will engage students and challenge their way of thinking about health around the world and in particular women's maternal health. This lesson would be suitable for students in Social Studies 8; Social Studies 11.