Here is my lesson plan for a traditional medicine lesson using local flora. Please feel free to use, modify, enhance, or expand at your pleasure. If you have any ideas or comments on what might make this lesson better, please share. This lesson was created with a general science and a medical intervention class in mind, but it could be easily manipulated to fit several different class settings. SOAP Note ScAK_Flora_LP
The primary Cultural Standard for Curriculum that my lesson applies to is Standard B. Standard B states that “a culturally-responsive curriculum recognizes cultural knowledge as part of a living and constantly adapting system that is grounded in the past, but continues to grow through the present and into the future.” In my lesson, students will be researching and exploring the surrounding area and identifying various native plants. From here, they would look up the traditional medicinal uses of the plants, which connects them to past knowledge of the region. This lesson can be expanded to reference present day medical research that is scouring the rainforest in search of the next best drug. The majority of modern pharmaceuticals are derived from compounds found in nature, and student’s could see the correlations between traditional medicine and present day research. The past is present, and the present leads to the future.
http://ankn.uaf.edu/publications/standards.html
