Curriculum Overview
Curriculum for Emotional Literacy
Extensions curriculum volumes have been developed over the course of several decades. These volumes have been extracted and compiled from materials originally produced as retreat workbooks, seminar handouts, and orientation pamphlets. Each volume has both a student workbook and Demonstrator Guide, the latter which contains specific delivery instructions to enable facilitators (demonstrators) to maximize benefit to their students.
Each volume is developed specifically for those marginalized populations who frequently do not see their experience accurately reflected in mainstream media, educational materials or recovery literature. These curriculums have been used in Therapeutic Communities internationally and is ideal for men and women in residential, outpatient, and incarcerated settings.
Substance abuse treatment programs, in-prison rehabilitation programs, transitional living centers, domestic violence programs, anger management classes, parenting classes, halfway houses, and at-risk youth programs can easily integrate Extensions curriculum into their teaching.
In addition to consulting, Naya Arbiter is an approved continuing education provider and has helped numerous programs implement the curriculum as part of their quality assurance systems as a method to monitor program effectiveness and meet clinical requirements set forth by licensing agencies. Ms. Arbiter is also experienced in training faculty to improve student retention, relapse prevention, culture change, and recidivism reduction.
Extensions curriculum are designed to foster personal growth, emotional literacy, and social responsibility.
Why Extensions Curriculum?
The intent of the Extensions curriculum is to present information that the TC student can apply personally (microcosm) and relate to globally (macrocosm). Quotes, stories, biographies and anecdotes from national and international role models who engaged in a process of positive personal change while contributing to their communities are consistently referenced. For instance, the group process is used within the context of a Therapeutic Community and Twelve Step, but was also utilized by Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. During its seven years of its existence, 22,000 people shared their stories with the intent of sorting through the trauma that had affected their lives.
Teaching and learning, especially in the group process, is, in large part, about “story”. The great Jungian analyst, Helen Luke once stated that the world is not defined so much by the battles that have been won and lost but by the stories that we love and believe in. The culture of the convicted, the addicted, of the street, and of degradation, is a culture which embodies oral tradition and story—albeit toward destructive ends. Many students have singlemindedly focused on developing strategies for getting what they wanted; securing drugs, committing crimes, and manipulating for personal gain. These strategies i.e. “stories” are passed and shared within any drug using/criminal community. Students have demonstrated the ability to focus, but lack the experience of focusing on giving rather than getting. Their focus has primarily been on short-term, rather than long-term gratification. To internalize “right living” as Dr. George DeLeon puts it, is a process not an event. Ideally, the TC provides the materials, tools, resources, and a “village” in which to practice skills which will grow and develop long past the “treatment episode”.
