EDUCATORS and parents often find it more difficult to teach children how to build good personal relationships than to teach them how to walk, talk, tie shoes, read, write, count, use computers, and drive cars. Yet, successful relations in families and friendships do more to determine the overall quality of a person's life than any grade on a report card or figure on a paycheck. Unfortunately, many young people learn less about the four-letter word "love" than they do about others scrawled on lavatory walls.
The "Loving Well" Project, at Boston University's School of Education, is trying to change that. It uses curriculum developed and piloted under a five-year grant from the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs (a division of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services) to address the problem of teenage pregnancy. Field-tested in Maine, South Carolina, and Massachusetts, the curriculum is now being used in 47 states and Canada. The curriculum is unique in its use of quality literature to help preteens and adolescents learn social and emotional skills and to develop responsible sexual values.
The 340-page text, The Art of Loving Well: A Character Education Curriculum for Today's Teenagers, is an anthology of 40 culturally diverse selections in fiction, including both time honored classics and contemporary literature. The three sections of the text--"Early Loves and Losses," "Romance," and "Commitment and Marriage"-include short stories, poems, essays, drama, folk tales, and myths.
Although designed for middle-level health or English classes, the curriculum has been used effectively in a wide variety of classroom settings. While it promotes the language arts skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking, it can be integrated with science, home economics, physical education, and guidance-department activities.
The value of the curriculum's literature-based approach is that the metaphors of art reveal essential issues in human relationships in all their complexity and nuances. Together, adults and youths can explore fundamental questions about all kinds of relationships and learn from one another without embarrassment as they talk about fictional characters and situations.
Among the literary selections in the curriculum, "Up on Fong Mountain," by Norma Fox Mazer, details a girl's first romance and questions about sexuality through witty journal entries. Folk tales such as "Beauty and the Beast" (the version by Madame Leprince de Beaumont) are included because students can reread them to gain insight about perennial problems such as sibling rivalry and the essential qualities of enduring relationships.
"Too Early Spring," by Stephen s Vincent Benet, depicts an unusually mature teenage relationship and the reality that parents, too, make mistakes. "A Distant Bell," by Elizabeth Enright, and "Ancestor," by Jimmy Santiago Baca, explore issues especially relevant to students in single parent families.
While the curriculum challenges academically gifted students, some of its most dramatic successes involve chronic low-achievers. Some participating teachers initially questioned whether the reading level of the literature would be beyond the grasp of some of their students. But they realized that it was not an obstacle if they read aloud some selections-a practice recommended for all classes on occasion, anyway--and that their students with severe learning disabilities should not be denied access to good literature, either.
In the approach used here, the metaphors of art reveal essential issues in human relationships in all their complexity and nuances.
To help students learn vicariously from their readings (rather than from painful experiences in their lives), the curriculum includes an array of class activities to enhance learning from
each literary selection. Encouraging students to pause to discuss characters in a work of fiction, to predict the course of events, to consider the range Of options, and to craft alternative dialogue all help to build the "text crawling" skills and habits of reflection that are central to the "anti-impulse" orientation of the Loving Well Project.
The supplementary teacher's guide recommends covering fewer selections in greater depth. Many students have found the stories so compelling, however, that they've read the entire book, even when not assigned.
In Roxbury, one of Boston's inner city neighborhoods, a teacher of at risk students "complained" that he couldn't keep his stock of books from disappearing. He marveled that his eighth-graders not only wanted to keep the books but were talking to their parents about what they read.
Conversation Starters
In fact, many student activities that go with the literature are designed to generate conversations with parents or other adults, to underscore collective wisdom. Parents have applauded the curriculum for avoiding being sexually explicit and for promoting conflict resolution, self-awareness, self-discipline, and delayed gratification.
Loving Well affirms that love, respect, trust, and sacrifice are not outdated virtues. Without being preachy, it reinforces the efforts of teachers and parents who advocate responsible social behavior.
The Loving Well Project respects local decisions on if, how, and when to teach the physiology of human sexuality, methods of contraception, and alternative lifestyles. Whatever the outcomes of these thorny, endless debates, the curriculum can be taught along with state and community sex education programs. In fact, it has been used in states ranging from South Carolina, where local mandates prohibit discussion of alternative lifestyles, to Massachusetts, where state law requires it.
As required by the federal grant, the Loving Well Project was subjected to a stringent outside evaluation that included control and experimental groups and a pretest and post-test format. The resulting 34-page evaluation document has confirmed the positive impact of the curriculum in promoting responsible attitudes and behavior and delaying the onset of sexual activity among participating students.
Perhaps the most striking finding involved students who had not had sexual relations before entering eighth grade: A disturbing 28% of the control group became sexually active during their eighth-grade year, compared to a figure of only 8% in the Loving Well group.
Still, the comments of students have provided the most gratifying assessments of the Loving Well curriculum. A 13-year-old testified to its effectiveness when she said, "I know I don't have real love now. Loving Well made me realize that. I just now realize how young I am and how I'm not physically or mentally ready for anything that demanding. Before Loving Well, I thought,Why not? But now ... I know I want to wait." An initially reluctant male student concluded, "It sounds like a stupid title, but it teaches you a lot of things about life."
Nancy McLaren is Coordinator and Curriculum Developer, Loving Well Project, Boston University, School of Education, 2 Silber Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02215. Condensed from Middle Matters, 6 (Fall 1997), 5-6.
Published by the National Association of elementary School Principals, 1615 Duke Street, Alexandria, Virginia 22314- 3483 (phone: 703-684-3345).