Teaching and Learning

• Environmental Education in the Community

  Whether you wish to carry out a simple awareness activity or plan to manage a long-term project, this manual has advice, tips, and project management ideas for a successful program. Includes guidance for starting and managing an education project, as well as the many practical activities to conduct with a variety of audiences. Field-generated material includes a chapter on establishing and sustaining camps as well as a chapter detailing step-by-step directions to conduct numerous activities and projects.

  • Download Environmental Education in the Community in its entirety (21.3 MB)
  • Part 1: Introduction, Chapters 1–7, and Training Modules (Project Design and Management) (6.7 MB)
  • Part 2: Chapters 8–9 (Environmental Education Camps and Environmental Education Centers) (3.5 MB)
  • Part 3: Chapter 10 (Environmental Education Community Projects), Appendix (11.3 MB)

• Adapting Environmental Educational Materials

  This manual walks through the steps of evaluating, filtering and adapting existing environmental education materials for specific needs. It includes training sessions for skills development and examples of consolidating a curriculum, adapting resources to local realities, and incorporating content in traditional classroom subjects and non-formal youth programs. A companion to Environmental Education in the Schools. ERIC: ED432466. NTIS: PB99 155202 NTIS Price Code: A10/A02.

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• Building Bridges: A Peace Corps Classroom Guide to Cross-Cultural Understanding

  This electronic publication is a classroom resource and contains short, adaptable lesson plans and activities that build cross-cultural awareness, respect, and communication skills. Lessons are flexible, easy to use, and standards-based for easy adaptation by teachers of U.S. grades 6 through 12.

  Online Guide

• Beyond the Classroom: Empowering Girls

  This Idea Book, generated from Volunteer experiences, provides practical advice for empowering young women through every day activities. It promotes the use of workshops, camps, clubs, special events, and friendly conversations, which present opportunities to encourage goal-setting, positive decision-making skills, build confidence, and help girls change their lives for the better.

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• Community Content Based Instruction (CCBI) Instruction Manual

  This publication is based on the CCBI approach of using local indigenous knowledge and easily accessible resources to make classroom subject matter more relevant to students while engaging community members in ongoing learning experiences. This can be the best of "place-based" learning for youth or adults along with community outreach in any sector. See also the participant's guide: Working with CCBI: Volunteer Workbook (ICE Number M0073).

  • Manual One

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  • Manual Two

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• Culture Matters: The Peace Corps Cross-Cultural Workbook

  Culture Matters is an excellent training resource designed to increase cultural awareness from self-reflection and observation, through communication and adaptation. This interactive workbook uses exercises, stories, quotations, and descriptive text to help the reader successfully adapt to a new culture or live and work in a multicultural environment. Illustrated. ERIC: ED429911.

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• Culture Matters Trainers' Guide

  Training sessions in this guide correspond to concepts introduced in the Culture Matters Workbook.

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• Environmental Education in the Schools: Creating a Program that Works!

  This manual offers useful information on introducing environmental issues into an academic curriculum. Each of the nine chapters deals with a different aspect of developing and implementing an environmental education program, starting with assessing local environmental problems and school conditions to determining goals and objectives, ways of gaining program support, and evaluating results. Contains a wealth of activities, enlivened with illustrations, case studies, and Volunteer examples. ERIC: ED363 520. NTIS: PB94 125051 NTIS Price Code: A22/A04

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• In the Classroom: Empowering Girls

  This resource provides background information on the importance of using a holistic approach to promote girls' education. It provides ideas for creating a girl-friendly learning environment, classroom and curriculum-related activities, co-curricular activities, awards and incentives, and scholarships. Examples of specific activities implemented by Peace Corps Volunteers and their counterparts around the world are included.

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• Insights from the Field: Understanding, Geography, Culture, and Service

  This resource is designed to engage American students in an inquiry about the world, themselves, and others as they focus on a culture other than their own. This resource contains learning activities and performance tasks to help students learn about geography; increase their understanding of other cultures; appreciate how they are connected to their world; become inspired to engage in service to others; and achieve important curriculum standards.

  Online Guide

• La Cultura si Importa

  This publication is the Spanish language version of Culture Matters: The Peace Corps Cross-Cultural Workbook.

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• Looking at Ourselves and Others

  The activities contained in this resource will challenge students to become more conscious of the values they share with their families, friends, and communities. The materials also provide students with analytical tools that help combat stereotypical thinking and enhance cross-cultural communication..

  Online Guide

• Nonformal Education Manual

  This manual addresses practical skills for engaging in nonformal education (NFE) with a background in the underlying theory. NFE can be used across all programming sectors and is effective for identifying and maximizing learning opportunities with a wide variety of groups in almost any setting.

  • Manual One

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  • Manual Two

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• Uncommon Journeys: Peace Corps Adventures Across Cultures

  Featuring 11 essays by returned Peace Corps Volunteers, Uncommon Journeys lends readers an insider's view of life as a Volunteer. Challenges. Rewards. Humor. And, most importantly: lessons about life in other cultures. Ten of the selections are accompanied by lessons designed for 6th- through 12th-grade classrooms. Stories range from Eastern Europe to Africa, and from Central America to Asia.

  Online Guide

• Voices from the Field: Reading and Writing about the World, Ourselves, and Others

  This resource contains two sections and is designed for use by language arts teachers in U.S. grades 7-12. The Peace Corps Stories section contains narratives, fiction, folktales, and poetry around which lesson plans are organized. The Curriculum Units section contains two separate, but complementary language arts units: Reading and Responding to Literature and A Reading and Writing Workshop. Lessons are intended to engage students' imaginations and inspire them to lead "wide-awakened" lives.

  Online Guide

• Working With Community Content Based Instruction (CCBI) Instruction Manual: Volunteer Workbook

  This publication is based on the CCBI approach of using local indigenous knowledge and easily accessible resources to make classroom subject matter more relevant to students while engaging community members in ongoing learning experiences. See also the trainer's guide: Community Content-based Instruction Manual (ICE Number T0112).

  Download PDF (file size: 2,837 KB)

Last updated Apr 23 2009