Engaged Youth » Proposal: Curriculum and Becoming Citizens

Proposal: Curriculum and Becoming Citizens

October 22nd, 2007 at 12:41pm Toby Campbell Permalink

PROPOSAL B:
CREATING PSO CURRICULUM

Rationale:
Folks at the YMCA program have been doing an excellent job creating new curriculum for the PSO team at the Y on the fly. However, more resources allocated toward the creation, packaging and testing of curriculum would be very helpful, especially if we think of this curriculum as leverage – an appealing resource – for new partners down the road. This proposal therefore suggests a way that we may be able to support additional curriculum construction and testing, and to expose potential new partners and youth to the PSO program and site along the way.

Adapting the Becoming Citizens Program:
In the winter and fall, BC interns would work with staff support to develop and test specific curriculum modules. These would be designed in the form of discrete workshops that BC interns would go out into the community to facilitate at youth organizations around Seattle. Each workshop would teach a particular skill and would use the PSO website as a workshop tool whenever possible. In this way, youth and organizations would be exposed to the commons while receiving valuable curriculum and a free workshop that would teach a specific skill to their youth. Additionally, we would have the opportunity to test and refine exportable curriculum modules that we could use to attract new partners over time.

What we’d need to support this:
1. Support for curriculum development (School of Education?)
2. Curriculum subcommittee meetings to decide
-What specific learning goals to address with BC curriculum
-Logistics of how to create curriculum and test it: timeline
-Resources, needs, scope of work

Comments?

Entry Filed under: digital learning skills

2 Comments Add your own

1. ctugwell | October 22nd, 2007 at 10:52 pm

I really like the idea of BC interns facilitating workshops that tie into producing content for PSO. The exposure is great, and you avoid adding more work to an overworked youth worker or teacher. From my perspective it’s an easy win-win.

I also talked about how BC interns help build capacity in a partnership posting today. How cool would it be to provide a couple weeks of video production training to a few BC interns and let them go work with youth at another organization to create PSA’s, photo essays, or street interviews. At the same time, you provide the organization with $1000 to $1500 worth of video production equipment and in return they promise to produce a few pieces of youth media a year.

Not sure if we’ll be ready to use all the BC interns this winter or spring though. Full implementation may happen fall 09.
2. Deen Freelon | October 23rd, 2007 at 1:44 am

I agree with Chris—this is a great value-add given that PSO will be a tough sell to already-overcommitted nonprofit partners. Again, I’d be happy to work up or adapt some tech modules that could be very attractive to some partners.

On a slightly different note, what do people think about including some of this specific info in our BC recruitment lit (i.e. you’ll be running workshops for kids on topics including x, y, and z in area community orgs)? I’m looking at Chris W.’s recruitment message right now and it doesn’t give much of an idea of what students will actually be doing (aside from generally helping youth with tech). I think a bit more specificity might help sell BC with undergrads once we get our curriculum down, but that might not happen fast enough now that I think about it. Maybe something to think about for the future if that’s the case.