Category: Religious education

Updated Greek Myths curriculum

I spent the last two days doing an update of the Greek Myths curriculum on my curriculum website.

Tessa Swartz, then 12 years old, and I developed this curriculum back in 2014. Teachers at the UU Church of Palo Alto did a field test in 2015, and I did a quick revision that year incorporating field test feedback. I was supposed to do a final edit the following year (2016), but that was the year my father died and I wound up dropping the project. Nevertheless, the curriculum continued in use at the Palo Alto church right up through the pandemic.

This final revision retains the same stories originally curated by Tessa and me in 2014. But the following changes were made: revised the lesson plans (some quite heavily); added more illustrations; upgraded existing illustrations; rewrote the introduction; and did an overall edit.

If you have any comments on the curriculum, please leave them here or email me.

A woman chained to a rack cliff, with a sea monster below her and a man hovering above her.
A new illustration just added to the Greek Myths curriculum: Andromeda chained to the rock. This is a detail from a Roman wall painting of the first century BCE, from the Boscotrecase, Italy (public domain image).

Updated curriculum

I just finished an update of an 8-session curriculum (with an additional ninth alternate session) titled “From Long Ago.” This curriculum is based on stories from the old Sophia Fahs book From Long Ago and Many Lands. To avoid some of the biases Fahs had, I went back to the original sources she used, and referred to other translations and sources, to completely rewrite all the stories.

Version 2.0 of the curriculum has now been released — see it here. In addition to cosmetic changes and light editing throughout, I’ve added more illustrations. I also added several stories; version 1 of the curriculum required access to the 1948 Fahs book, but with the addition of these stories, Version 2 is now completely independent of the Fahs book.

I’m planning to release additional over the next few months. These new releases will be numbered as Version 2.x. I’ve already rewritten some other stories from the Fahs book, and am working on new session plans for those stories.

To allow for updates, this is an online-only curriculum for now. Someday if I have time, I may create a print-on-demand version, for those who prefer a hard copy (it’ll be expensive, though, due to the numerous color illustrations).

Ecological board games

The Religious Education Association is holding an online talk this evening. One of the presenters will be on ecological board games:

“Paul H. Van Straten, Memorial University of Newfoundland: ‘Anticipating the Opportunities and Challenges of Using Commercial-off-the-Shelf Games to Educate People on Environmental Sustainability in a Christian Context.’ Some studies show that digital games and board games can be used to facilitate religious learning in Christian post-secondary settings. Would game-based learning be a viable option for educating Christians on environmental sustainability in a congregational church environment? This paper analyzes several commercially-available ecological digital games and board games to explore potential learning opportunities and challenges for integrating such games in a Christian small-group study environment.”

Although the paper will tell about games in Christian communities, I imagine the findings will be applicable to Unitarian Universalist communities as well (perhaps with some tweaking and language changes).

This is actually a topic that I’ve been working for some years now. I’ve used various ecological games in Unitarian Universalist religious education for children and teens since at least 2006. Recently, I’ve been working on ecology games for adults. To this end, I recently attended an online talk by Thomas Maiorana, professor of design at U.C. Davis, where he introduced a board game he’s developing that’s intended to promote wildfire resiliency in local communities. (You can watch a recording of the talk here.)

Local congregations and faith communities should be ideal settings for ecology board games. So I’m looking forward to tonight’s presentation, in hopes that I’ll learn about some new games, and more importantly learn about implementation strategies.

For the record, some of the ecology board games I’ve used in UU settings include:

  1. Wildcraft: A Cooperative Herbal Adventure Game teaches players about some common wild herbs. It plays well with mixed age groups, and in my experience kids up through middle school have fun with it. At approx. $50, it’s expensive.
  2. NOAA’s Carbon Cycle Game shows how burning fossil fuels affects the carbon cycle. You can play this as a tabletop game, or as a run-around game.
  3. Family Pastimes publishes several board games with ecological themes. I’ve played three of their games — A Beautiful Place, Earthquake, and Dragonfly with young children, and all three were fun and well-designed. Better yet, they were inexpensive, just $12-15 each. (But these aren’t adult-friendly games.)
  4. Promoting Wildfire Resilience. Thomas Maiorana hasn’t yet made the board game publicly available, but will do so soon on this website.

In addition, the following are run-around games, not board games, but worth playing:

  1. Lynxes, Hares, and Leaves is an active run-around game I got from environmental educator Steve van Matre’s book Acclimatizing. I’ve played this successfully with mixed age groups including adults and kids. Here’s an old version of my adaptation of this game. Someday I’ll get around to posting my updated rules.
  2. The Food Chain Game is another run-around game that I’ve played successfully with mixed age groups. This is my heavily adapted version of a game from the old Project WILD curriculum. Again, one of these days I’ll post my rules.

Other games I’m intrigued by, but haven’t yet played, include the following:

  1. Several ecology games in this listicle on the Edge Effects website
  2. Wildfire: A Learning Game, a free game which you download and print yourself
  3. Two adult-friendly games from Family Pastimes: Climate Crisis and Somewhere Everywhere Water Rising

New edition of the “Ecojustice Class” curriculum

Not many blog posts recently, as my spare time has been taken up with revising religious education curriculum.

I just completed a version of my full-year middle school “Ecojustice Class” curriculum for southern New England. Congregations in similar climates in the eastern U.S. should probably be able to use this curriculum as well. This is a beta test version — entirely teachable, but the curriculum is still a little rough around the edges.

Much of this is adapted from the northern California version of the curriculum, which we developed over ten years at the UU Church of Palo Alto. For New Englanders, I adapted this curriculum to a four-season climate. I added several proven session plans which have been adapted from Ecojustice Camp, as well as from my summer eco-spirituality workshops that I’ve led off and on since 2006 (mostly at Ferry Beach Conference Center).

Read about the Ecojustice Class concept on my curriculum website. Then if the concept works for your congregation, you can click through to Ecojustice Class Southern New England.

Updated curriculum on truth

I just updated my story-based curriculum “Beginnings,” aimed at middle and upper elementary ages. This is a “light revision,” mostly cosmetic but with a few major changes.

This eight-session curriculum features explorations of truth — what is true, how do we know what truth is? This topic seems quite relevant in this presidential election year.

See “Beginnings” on my curriculum website.

Garlic Mustard song

The invasive species problem remains one of the top threats to Earth’s life-sustaining systems. Yes, global climate change is scary, especially now that it looks like we’re now on track for a 2.5 degree increase. Sigh. But it’s also scary to watch familiar landscapes rapidly lose their biodiversity as they are overrun by invasives — native trees literally being pulled down by Oriental Bittersweet, native songbirds being driven out their nesting sites by invasive House Sparrows, native plants being killed off by the chemicals released into the soil by invasive Garlic Mustard…. Anyway, I decided to write a song about what we can do to Garlic Mustard.

Image of sheet music

(Yes I claim copyright, but I hereby grant you permission to sing it, reproduce it, record it, etc.)

Recipe for Garlic Mustard Pesto.

Ecojustice and music education

I’ve started reading an article about combining ecojustice education with music education. It’s kind of theoretical, but there’s good content buried beneath the academic prose style. I’m fascinated with the topic, because our ecojustice camp curriculum includes singing and natural soundscapes as crucial curriculum components.

Below is the abstract of the article (followed by a full citation and a link to the full article):

“Children who are supported throughout childhood and adolescence to both
maintain their sense of wonder in nature, and honor and explore their
wild human nature, are well positioned to mature into soulcentric adults
capable of living into their purpose in service to both their culture
and the whole of life. However, our society’s ecocidal culture and
unjust institutions often replicate oppressions and promote egocentric
behaviors that preclude thriving. Additionally, many children are
alienated from nature and are thought to have nature-deficit disorder,
which can include both mental and physical maladies. In this article I
explore conceptions of ecojustice education to further illustrate
pathways for curriculum development in music education that might
encourage children and adolescents to maintain their sense of wonder in
nature, fully develop their sensory capacities, support their mental and
emotional wellbeing, attune more carefully to their wild nature and
soul’s purpose, and contribute to the environmental and social
commons — all which might support human flourishing and the continued
survival of our species.”

Citation: “Music Education for Surviving and Thriving: Cultivating Children’s Wonder, Senses, Emotional Wellbeing, and Wild Nature as a Means to Discover and Fulfill Their Life’s Purpose,” by Tawnya D. Smith, Music Education, School of Music, College of Fine Arts, Boston University, Boston, MA, United States. Frontiers in Education, 16 April 2021, Sec. Educational Psychology, vol. 6, 2021 — https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.648799 — Link to the article.

Child protection resource

Our congregation here in Cohasset, Mass., operates a preschool. The school is currently updating its child protection policy. As part of their research, the school’s governing board found the YMCA’s Child Abuse Prevention Policies.

If you deal with child safety issues, the whole policy is worth reading. But I especially appreciated three parts of this policy document.

1. First, they offer guidance on what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate physical interactions. Appropriate physical interactions include:

  • Side hugs
  • Shoulder-to-shoulder…hugs
  • Pats on the shoulder or back
  • Handshakes
  • High-fives and hand slapping
  • Verbal praise
  • Pats on the head when culturally appropriate
  • Touching hands, shoulders, and arms
  • Arms around shoulders
  • Holding hands (with young children in escorting situations)

Personally, I’d be more restrictive than this list— e.g., I’d be very reluctant to pat a child on the head, or touch shoulders. And I’d only put arms around shoulders in extreme situations, e.g., when comforting a crying child. Nevertheless, I think this is a good summary. I’ll let you look at the actual document to see what constitutes inappropriate touch. (No sitting on laps! No piggyback rides!)

2. Also worth looking at is the YMCA’s straightforward summary of appropriate electronic communications. No private messaging with a Facebook “friend” who is under age! No “friending” under age people on any social media!

3. Third, I really appreciated their policy on “Managing the risk when one staff member is alone with one youth.” We have policies where you should never be alone one-on-one with a legal minor. And there are always times when it seems necessary, e.g., when talking about a young person about behavior issues. Straightforward guidance — if you have to have a one-on-one, do so in a public place where you are in full view of others (I’ve done this where I made sure my supervisor was nearby, and deliberately watching). If you have to meet in a room, leave the door open. If a young person discloses abuse, etc., document it immediately.

A final comment: What I especially like about this document is that it answers just about all the questions I’ve ever gotten from volunteers and paid staff when I’ve done training in child abuse prevention policies.

Tortoise and a man named Tela

Another story for liberal religious kids. This one is from the Yoruba tradition. While this story has a mythological elements — it tells how Tortoise got the joints in its shell — it is also a morality tale. Tortoise is another animal trickster figure who is featured in many stories — sometimes he gets the better of others, but sometimes, as in this story, his greed gets the better of him. Another Yoruba story about Tortoise.

Once there was a shortage of food throughout the land. Àjàpá the Tortoise, who was a very sensible animal, was friendly with a man named Tela. Tortoise was sick with hunger, because he didn’t know where he could get food. But Tela knew where he could get food. Now and again Tela went to this place, and got food and ate it there.

At last Tortoise said to Tela, “You look well-fed, but I get nothing to eat. You are my friend, yet you never show me where you get food.”

“I thought of taking you,” said Tela, “but I know you to be very clever. I fear that you will go to my place without my permission. Because of that, I have not told you.”

Tortoise kept asking, though, and at last Tela promised to take him to the place. When they got to the place, Tortoise saw it was just a rock. But Tela sang:

“This rock must open because I, Prince Tela, the owner of the house have come!”

Then the rock opened and Tela and Tortoise went inside. They found plenty of food, and they ate until they were full. After they had finished, they left the place, each going to his own home.

The next day Tela was away from home. So Tortoise went all around the countryside, inviting all the people to come to Tela’s place to get food. When everyone arrived at the place, Tortoise sang:

“This rock must open because I, Prince Tela, the owner of the house have come!”

The rock did not know that it was not Tela who sang, but Tortoise. So the rock opened, all the animals went inside, and they finished all the food in the store.

When they had finished eating, Tortoise said, “I will be the last to go.” But just as Tortoise was leaving, the rock closed and trapped him, half in and half out.

Just then, Tela felt hungry. When he got to the rock, he saw the head of Tortoise sticking. Tela said, “How is it that I find you here? When I brought you here the day before yesterday you promised you would not come, but now you have come, and from all the footprints in the dirt it looks like you brought friends with you.”

But Tortoise was in pain, and said only, “Get me out and don’t talk.” Tela, being hungry, commenced to sing:

“This rock must open because I, Prince Tela, the owner of the house have come!”

Just as before, the rock opened. Now Tela was very hungry, and because of the food he thought lay before him, did not stop to talk with Tortoise. But when Tela went in, he saw that all was eaten, and nothing was left.

Tela was so angry that he caught Tortoise up and was about to crush him. “Have patience and I will tell you all,” said Tortoise, and he told the entire story. And Tortoise added, “I have to admit that there is something that always makes me tell things I ought not to tell.”

“I have no time for this sort of thing,” said angry, hungry Tela. He dropped Tortoise on the rock and smashed his shell all to pieces.

Then the big ants and other insects gathered round, and tried to put Tortoise together again. They did the best they could, but they could not mend his back properly. So it is that the joints where the insects mended the Tortoise show on his back to this day.

Source

John Parkinson, “Yoruba Folk-Lore,” African Affairs, vol. VIII, no. XXX, January 1909, pp. 180-181 doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a098993

For a different version of this story, see ?gb??n ju agbára on The Yoruba blog.

Line drawing of a tortoise
Centrochelys sulcata, from Tortoises, Terrapins, and Turtles (London: Sotheran Baer & co., 1872).

Tortoise and Elephant

Another story for liberal religious kids, this time from the Yoruba people.

Tortoise one day told the other animals that he would ride Elephant, the way humans ride horses. But all the other animals said: “No, you can’t ride Elephant.”

Tortoise said, “Well, I will make a bet with you that I will ride Elephant into town.”

All the other animals agreed to the bet.

Tortoise went into the forest and met Elephant. He said, “Elephant, all the animals say you are too fat and too big to go into town.”

Hearing this, Elephant grew angry. He said, “The animals are fools. I do not go into town because I would rather stay in the forest. Besides, I do not know which path leads to town.”

“Oh, if that’s all,” said Tortoise, “you can come with me. I will show you the path that leads to town, and you can put all the other animals to shame.”

So Elephant followed along, and when they were near to town, Tortoise said: “Oh, Elephant, I am tired. Will you kindly allow me to get on your back?”

“Of course,” said Elephant. He knelt down, and Tortoise climbed up on his back. Then they continued along the path to town.

Then Tortoise said, “Elephant, you need to put on a good show when you get to town. So when I scratch your back, run. When I knock my head against your back, run faster. Then you will impress all the other animals.”

Elephant agreed that this sounded like a good idea.

When they came near the town, Tortoise scratched Elephant’s back. Elephant began to run. Next, Tortoise knocked Elephant’s back with his head. Elephant ran even faster.

The animals, when they saw this, were frightened. They went into their houses, but they looked out of their windows. And Tortoise called out to them: “Did I not say I would ride to town the way humans ride horses?”

“What do you mean that you ride me like humans ride horses?” said Elephant, growing angry.

“I am only praising you,” said Tortoise.

But Elephant saw the other animals laughing, and grew more angry. “I will throw you down on the hard stones here, and break you to pieces,” he cried.

“Yes, yes, that is right,” said Tortoise. “Throw me down here. That will be all right. Then I shall not be hurt. If you really wanted to kill me, you would carry me to a swamp. If you threw me in a swamp, I would die at once, for the mud and water would drown me.”

So Elephant ran to the swamp, and threw Tortoise into the mud. Then Elephant stretched out his foot to kick Tortoise, but Tortoise dived in the muddy water, and came up in another place.

The other animals were there, looking on, and Tortoise called out to them, “Did I not say I would ride Elephant the way humans ride horses?”

When Elephant found that he could not catch Tortoise, he ran back to the forest. There he said to the other elephants, “Do you know what Tortoise has done to me?” And he told the other elephants the story.

But the other elephants only said, “You were a fool to carry Tortoise to town.”

Since then Elephant has not come to town any more.

Source: Alfred Burdon Ellis, The Yoruba-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa : their religion, manners, customs, laws, language, etc : with an appendix containing a comparison of the Tshi, Gã, ?we, and Yoruba languages (London: Chapman and Hall, 1894).