August 2009 Newsletter
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In previous letters I've told you about our ongoing work to develop a pro-life curriculum for high school students. I'm excited to share that we've reached an important milestone in this project.
We have completed the first two lessons of our curriculum, called "Principles and Choices," and this content sets out the foundational material on which the rest of the lessons will be based.
We focus on how to define happiness, how we know objective truth, and how sound principles of human rights point directly to a pro-life position.
Both lessons will be thoroughly tested on over 1,200 students in pre-arranged pilot classrooms this Fall. In the next few months, we'll be training teachers, videotaping classes, interviewing students and teachers, pouring through hundreds of evaluations, and refining the lessons for final print.
One week from now, I will be traveling to Mobile, Alabama to train teachers at McGill-Toolen Catholic High School, one of our testing sites. They instantly agreed to let us test the program on their entire student body after I gave a philosophical defense of the pro-life position to a smaller gathering of 500 of their students this past March.
The teachers were thrilled at how we were able to answer the students' questions with reason and compassion, and how we were able to present moral standards as not just "laws" or "rules," but rather as first principles that are grounded in who we are as human beings.
But even more impressive was how this instruction affected the students, and how much they nodded in agreement when I applied these first principles to the issues of abortion and euthanasia. One mother of a student told me that her daughter was moved to tears by our presentation, and that it completely transformed her thinking on pro-life issues.
After my presentation, I met with school President Fr. Bry Shields and faculty members. When I told them of our plans to develop a first-class, multi-media, pro-life curriculum for grades 9 through 12, they responded with enthusiasm and immediately signed up to become a testing school.
After two days of teacher training on August 10-11, I'll be returning to the school for an entire week during their school semester - not to teach, but rather to observe others teaching these concepts with the help of our instructional materials and training.
Simultaneous with this program in Mobile, we'll also be testing our first curriculum lessons in two different venues in the Seattle area. One venue will be all the 7th and 8th grade students at a local private school. This is part of an experiment to determine what parts of this curriculum we can successfully present to younger people even before they reach high school age.
We also realize that there is a huge population of Christian teens who don't attend Christian schools - but they do attend Christian youth groups. So we'll be helping a leader at a Seattle-area church to tailor the program for her youth group setting, and testing it there as well.
Friends, these three pilot projects represent enormous steps in our plans to bring pro-life education into every Christian classroom. We are doing something that no one else is doing. If we are going to succeed, we need your help right now.
We need to provide workbooks and audio CDs for over 1,200 students and their teachers, conduct teacher trainings in three locations, purchase professional videotaping equipment, finalize our student learning website, and facilitate hundreds of hours of interviews and evaluations.
Nothing could be more important in our mission than helping teachers bring real pro-life education into their own classrooms, with materials and multi-media resources that rival the very best in educational products.
We have come so far on the development of this high school curriculum. I hope you'll be willing to see us through this critical evaluation process - it is essential to meeting our goal of producing the best pro-life learning system ever used in schools or churches anywhere.
Your steadfast support of Healing the Culture has positioned us to have a major impact on the future of the pro-life movement. When our curriculum is distributed to thousands of churches and schools, it will have the potential to transform the values and personal beliefs of an audience that can be measured in the millions.
Your support for this project can leverage an enormous amount of cultural change - please consider the most generous contribution you can make at this time. Thank you so very much for your commitment!
Standing for Life,
Camille Pauley
President
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