During the 2013-14 school year ATHENA high school health teachers in the Bellevue School District continued their partnership with the EDGE Community Outreach Ethics Core staff, creating, improving, and testing classroom activities. Departmental graduate students visited Bellevue health teacher’s classes to lead a classroom activity. Portions of the district teacher planning days were dedicated to creating a district–wide vision that included core concepts of environmental health sciences. To support the goals of this partnership, the EDGE provided funding for a two-day intensive Environmental Health (EH) Unit Development Workshop held in June 2014. This workshop included collaborative curriculum mapping and working with DEOHS professors on specific areas of science content areas. The Bellevue School District team developed and adapted existing health lessons in: Food and Nutrition; New Technologies; and Personal Care Products. The ATHENA staff and Bellevue teachers finalized the educational materials the teachers would introduce to their Bellevue students during the 2014-15 school year.
This Bellevue cohort also worked with ATHENA staff and departmental faculty to train a new group of health teachers in August at the ATHENA-2014 workshop, becoming the third ATHENA cohort. The ATHENA-2014 workshop modeled a train-the-trainer methodology. Six health teachers from Central Washington high schools worked with EDGE veteran teachers Jay Young and Nancy Sedlecek, UW environmental health researchers, mentor teachers from the Bellevue District, and EDGE graduate students and staff. The new cohort was introduced to environmental health sciences concepts and explored the health lessons co-developed by the Bellevue health teachers. In the 2014-15 school year, students from six new schools from Central Washington were introduced to environmental health sciences concepts. In addition, an environmental health curriculum developed as part of the ATHENA program was piloted in Bellevue classrooms and is being presented for adoption in the Bellevue School District health curriculum.
Two one-page handouts, the Story of ATHENA and Participate in ATHENA, summarize the ATHENA project.
The ATHENA Environmental Health lessons for Health classes are available for free download under Engagement: Educator Resources.