Week 5

Most of this week was spent constructing my survey. I will be administering my survey in two ways. I will be collecting the majority of my data in person at a youth summit for teens that I will be hosting with Bloom365. My secondary form of surveying will be through an internet version of my survey. I will be sending this survey to the teenagers and young adults that I know personally. These secondary surveys will help me reach my ideal amount of data in order to reach proper conclusions. The survey primarily focuses on the nature of healthy and unhealthy relationships and safe dating habits.

Week 4

I came back to BASIS Peoria this week in order to discuss the programs that Bloom365 offers with the administrators. Although there was no opportunity to bring Bloom365 to the school during the current school year, I was able to start a dialogue about bringing the curriculum to BASIS tis upcoming school year. If I am able to garner enough participation and interest from parents and students, Bloom365 would visit the school seven times to deliver the curriculum to the students who signed up for the club. I encourage any parents reading this blog to look out for information regarding Bloom365 which will be available in newsletters and emails for next year. I'd like to spend the rest of this post answering some of the questions Mr.Allen and Mrs.Trower had about the curriculum for Bloom365. The two biggest concerns that both parents and faculty might have regarding the health education offered by Bloom365 would be the level of graphic content within the curriculum and times at which the curriculum would be delivered. Since Bloom365 started out as a teen dating abuse awareness organization, portions of the curriculum do focus on consent and violence. However, these are only specific portions of the seven day curriculum that is offered. Therefore, Bloom365 would be able to modify their approach in order to avoid the graphic content, if that is what the parents and faculty so desired. Bloom365 and its peer educators would rather focus on the portions of the curriculum that discuss self-esteem, gender norms and expectations, and the roots of things such as patriarchy and oppression. The other concern would be that the curriculum could interfere with school work and class hours. Despite normally coming to deliver the curriculum during a health or freshman science class, I have made sure that the curriculum would be optional for students, and would occur after school through the form of a club. Thus, any student who joins would not be deprived of class time, nor forced to join the club. I encourage anyone who still has questions about this to email me at arjunbiju3@gmail.com, as I will be one of the peer educators delivering the cirriculum with Bloom365. If you would like to learn more about the organization that I work for, here is their Facebook page and our main website