Mark L. Elliott and Professor Wesley R. Burr, Family Science
In May of 1996, I traveled to South America to teach a family life education course to parents in Paraguay. In the months preceding the trip, I sent packets of information to various public secondary schools in the area around the capital of Asuncion, offering a family enrichment course at no cost. After selecting a school, arrangements were made for school administrators to provide a classroom and needed materials for instruction.
The rationale behind the curriculum used in the course comes from a research group in the Department of Family Science headed by Dr. Wesley Burr. This group has been investigating the effects of kindness on family satisfaction, and preliminary results have shown kindness to be more fundamental in helping families be successful than the more widely used principles of communication, flexibility and cohesion.’ Dr. Shirley Klein and a group of undergraduate students, also from the Department of Family Sciences, have developed and are in the process of refining a curriculum based on this research. Among the topics addressed in these materials include kindness, caring, forgiveness, commitment and peacemaking. For my project, I adapted the topics to meet the needs of the Paraguayan population and translated the materials so they could be delivered in Spanish.
Upon arriving in Paraguay, I met with school administrators to discuss the arrangements, and they were courteous and willing to invite the parents of children in the seventh grade. The seventh grade is the lowest grade in their school and the administrators reasoned that the parents of these children would be more willing to attend the family education course because of their high level of involvement in the education of their children. The course given in Paraguay consisted of five classes, taught on Tuesday and Thursday evenings for three weeks. Depending on the night, eight to 30 parents attended the course and nine parents fulfilled the requirements necessary to receive a certificate of completion for the course. Course evaluations were positive and showed that the experience enriched those who participated.
The experience of planning and teaching this course provided me with more insight into program design, implementation and evaluation in family life education. In addition to increased knowledge concerning the learning process, I discovered a great deal about adapting educational methods to meet the needs of a group from a different cultural background.
References
- B. Harker, et al., A Theory of Loving: An Altruistic Alternative. Paper presented at National Council on Family Relations, Orlando, Florida (1992).