Monday, November 2, 2009

Ecological Learning as Pro-Active Relational Healing - for Family Interventions

My friend Nicole recently spoke about how experiential education would be most effective when it was woven with the experience young learners have with their families, and how this would build a sense of earth connection.

It brought up a question for me, about how the experiential aspect of young people connecting with earth processes through connection with the family, "bringing it home," would/could interact with families who have been disrupted by poverty or addiction. Is there a case to be made here that part of how we could do multivalent intervention in disrupted families (e.g. the teen gang programs that Multnomah County had designed a few years ago) could include this kind of pro-active ecology/cultural earth-based collaborative learning activity/process as part of the design for the intervention? That the very embeddedness we seek to generate in ecological approaches is the same as the one that would weave and mend families whose relationships, resilience, and capacities have been severely impacted by the consequences of cultures of domination and inequity? I'm sure folks are working on this various places, would love to hear what anyone has heard about!

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