In 2023, two Eastern Kentucky school districts were awarded their second grant from the National Science Foundation.

They used it to implement a new teaching model called Drawing on Kinship.

What's special about this model is that it intentionally incorporates Appalachia and culture into the classroom, and it's still going strong three years later.

Our Clayton Dalton has more in today's Education Matters reports.

Heather Wheeler is a seventh grade science teacher in Floyd County.

Over the past few years, she's been incorporating Appalachian culture and heritage into her classroom.

She encourages her students to identify problems facing the region.

When you start with that heritage aspect of my family deals with this.

That just happened off the road the other day, to some of my friends or, seeing the news and seeing that it is happening all around them, and starting with those conversations of who do you know that's going through this, really gets them engaged.

Heather learned this from a teaching model called Drawing on Kinship.

It uses four pillars to guide classroom instruction computational thinking like collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data, problem solving, educational content, and heritage ingenuity like elements of Appalachian culture and innovation.

We're at the drawing on Kinship Summer Institute.

Each year, we have been able to bring teachers together from, across the two counties to start with, Floyd and Pikeville independent.

But now, actually, we've brought in teachers from other rural communities, including communities in Alaska and Arizona and from a couple other counties as well, who have joined us to really learn about the drawing on kinship model and take the time to think together and build a lesson unit for them to do within their classrooms.

These lessons encourage students to look to their community.

We have this heritage of being creative and helping people solve problems.

So I had my students to look at all these stories and to see what was the problem that people had that they were trying to solve for.

Heather.

Students heard stories of people constantly checking the creek's water level during heavy rain.

Even in the middle of the night.

This community problem, a history of devastating floods, moved her students to design something that would help their neighbors using a $50 budget.

They created flood Guard, a flood warning system.

This year, it won first place at a statewide science and technology competition.

But working Appalachian heritage and community problem solving into classroom content isn't just about the present.

It's about the future, too.

The reason this is so important, it goes back to our original question that we had when we started.

This is how do we prepare students for jobs that that we don't even know exist today?

So in, you know, 2030 and 2040, when some of our students that are entering classrooms at the elementary level today, when they graduate, what kind of world are they walking into?

What are the skills and the jobs that we're preparing them for?

Students don't need to just know information.

They have to be able to come out of high school ready to solve problems that they are going to be facing.

Now, those could be personal or related to their community, but the jobs of the future are not going to be what we've been used to in the past.

The drawing on kinship model aims to prepare students not only for the next grade level or college, but to equip them to strengthen their community and their resume.

For Kentucky Edition, I'm Clayton Dalton.