Meaning of Home Youth Media Curriculum:
This curriculum integrates the Digital Media Arts Club model that the Public Media Corps has already developed, as well as the Standing Bear’s Foosteps standards-based Social Studies curriculum to broaden its reach beyond after-school and community groups and into the classroom as well. The curriculum, in implementation, will allow Native (and non-Native) youth to respond to the question: “What is the Meaning of Home?” through carefully crafted media responses.
In its initial implementation, the curriculum will bring professional media makers to three disparate communities: the Northern Ponca tribe’s Project Venture program for Native youth in Lincoln, Nebraska, the Southern Ponca Tribe’s Youth Outreach Program in White Eagle, Oklahoma, and to the urban Indian population in Minneapolis, Minnesota served by Migizi Communications. The partners were able to beta test the curriculum and provide the results of this implementation for the Standing Bear’s Footsteps website.
Standing Bear’s Footsteps is the story of the homeland of the Northern and Southern Ponca, these two groups served as the perfect test groups for this curriculum. Migizi Communications, which has a lot of expertise in training Native youth in professional media skills, is located in a Minneapolis community with a large and cohesive number of displaced and relocated Native people, and can easily implement this curriculum among their tribally-diverse cohort of youth. The prospect of having youth content on a PBS-branded website such as the Standing Bear’s Footsteps site serves as a legitimate professional opportunity for the Native youth, incentivizing their engagement with the curriculum. “What is the Meaning of Home?” is a Standards-based Social Studies curriculum, written by former Ponca Tribe of Nebraska chairman and curriculum-designer Larry Wright, Jr., for Standing Bear’s Footsteps around this question.
Sources for Curriculum Standards:
1. NCSS Standards for Social Studies (Teaching Social Studies Skills)
Adler, Susan A. National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies: A Framework for Teaching, Learning and Assessment. Silver Spring, Md: National Council for the Social Studies, 2010. Print.
2. Partnership for 21st Century Skills (Teaching Media Literacy)
Theme Strands:
Theme 2: Time, Continuity and Change p. 30-31
Theme 3: People, Places and Environments p. 34-35
Theme 4: Individual Development and Identity p. 38-39
Theme 5: Individuals, Groups and Institutions p. 42-43
Theme 6: Power, Authority and Governance p. 46-47