Our award-winning animation Goldtooth is a component of the new teacher and student curriculum being used by more than 5000 teachers with 300,000 students in Russia in their health classes.
Vladamir: teaching kids to make healthy choices
Russia
Vladimir has been the Director of Holis in Ekaterinburg, Russia for the last 10 years. He has been applying his expertise as a psychologist to working with teachers and counselors who work with inner city high school students and “at risk” young people.
Vladimir
is a proud “professional” that is very skeptical of “innovations” especially
from the West. Exposure to our Street
Health program elicited the response “this will never work
here, what could they possibly know about our young people”.
In the summer of 2002, Vladimir participated in a workshop with other teachers and counselors. He was surprised to find that we encouraged local organizations to adapt our materials and approach to address their unique context and needs. Vladimir was impressed and excited to expand the reach of Street Health but identified a key challenge – he needed resources to integrate the materials into government-approved curriculum for training teachers and students.
With our technical assistance and seed funding, a local government institution accessed funds from the Department of Education to develop a Street Health-based training program for regular and vocational school teachers and guidance counselors. The new teacher and student curriculum is being used by more than 5000 teachers with 300,000 students in Russia in their health classes.
