Great Plains Restoration Council “Serving our Youth, Protecting our Prairie Earth.”

announcing “the curriculum”

Ecological Health Curriculum for Schools.

In this country, there is such a profound lack and need of education that lastingly imbues our youth with the tools they need to take care of the health of their selves, their communities, and the Earth. GPRC's Youth InterACTION program has developed a new model that works. While we are building a small core of young leaders in our Youth InterACTION locations, obviously these successful principles and practices need to be further honed, standardized, and developed into a Curriculum that can be available for the general population. GPRC has assembled a core team of educators from Fort Worth and Houston to develop and write the Curriculum. We will be partnering with a couple selected schools throughout its development. The Curriculum will be designed at the 5th Grade level to start. Fort Worth and Houston will be the two cities in which initial implementation into a couple select schools transpires.

GPRC Ecological Heath Curriculum writers, Tameka Winston and Lenon Phillips

What makes our approach successful, particularly in terms of outdoor education, where others have a high drop out rate?

• Our approach is from the inside-out, rather than top-down, outside-in. This approach is anchored in the practice of having the child be a full partner in his or her learning. She or he is charted with the responsibility of helping assess and address the problems, through a practice of questions asked that lead to self-discovery. This is called the Socratic Method.
• We blend social work with ecological recovery and protection.
• The work is always interactive, energetic, we get kids outside, and they have to work as a team. We also "keep it real," which, in effect, meets the kids where they are at, and allows them to experience the meaningfulness of the work and studies to their own lives.
• They produce measurable, tangible progress, by their own hands and minds. Not enough can be said for how powerful this experience is for a kid who pretty much sees life as a set path with rigid barriers and himself as having no say in or affect upon anything that happens in life. Many young males automatically think that going to prison is like going to college, it’s just something that is expected before you become a man.
• We seek to employ all levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. In 1956, Benjamin Bloom headed a group of educational psychologists who found that, 95% of the time, test questions were only asking students to think at the lowest possible level, “the level of recall.” They developed a classification of the main levels important to intellectual behavior learning. Those levels are, from lowest to highest:

1. Knowledge
2. Comprehension
3. Application
4. Analysis
5. Synthesis
6. Evaluation

Just like if we don’t exercise the body, it will become weak and frail. The same holds true for the minds of our children. Society rarely gives youth the challenge, and so we have legions of youth turning to adults who just slog through the surface of life, not giving back, not participating, and largely wasting the gift of life and intellect with which they have been blessed.

• Lastly, students awaken to the exhilarating explosion of life on Earth, the unbelievably rich color and culture of the animal world, the natural rhythms, our living blue and green planet. We realize how much richer and less lonely we are by joining the community of life. While in many ways we humans have acted as if we were the only ones here, as we begin to realize how incredibly lucky and blessed we are to live within such an amazing world, there is hope for its (and our) survival and thriving. How gray, depressed and ill we would be if we wiped out everybody else. It’s time we take care of the animals, of wild nature. In doing so, we will so deeply take care of ourselves. This is so heartbreakingly apparent with our own native ecosystem, the Fort Worth Prairie.

The Curriculum will be standardized so it can be applied nationally, in any ecosystem. We will create one very specific (for Fort Worth and Texas), and one broad, that can be adopted and adapted to any ecosystem around the country.

GPRC will be posting regular updates and videos to this website so the public may follow along in the development of this first-ever Ecological Health Curriculum.

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