Content for Contentment
How It Works
Bala Yana content is organized around enduring understandings and thematic explorations that invite inquiry rather than instruction or dogma. Each theme begins with a guiding question, for example: Impermanence: Does anything ever stay the same? Then content is created and collected to illuminate that theme. There can be companion themes, such as an earth element or an ethical dilemma that evolves or resolves through the stories and songs collected. The materials are culled from a wide variety of sources, reflecting different artistic styles, world views, and cultural contexts, to present narratives and protagonists that children can recognize as themselves.
The curricular framework developed by Middle Way Education offers benchmarks and standards to help ensure a comprehensive set of learning outcomes with enduring understandings, knowledge, and actions that can be observed or measured. We also rely on the SEE curriculum developed at Emory University in collaboration with the office of HH the Dalai Lama, and other open source frameworks.
Core Themes
- Impermanence
- Wakefulness
- Cause and Effect
- Interconnection
- Harmony
- Lineage
- Taking Your Seat
- Finding Refuge
- The Unseen World
- Grief
- (This list continues to grow.)
Domains
Each episode balances the Five Domains of Learning, a framework refined through more than ten years of research and classroom practice. Each domain has a corresponding color, element, superpower, and direction:
- Humanities
- Arts
- Logic and Reason
- Embodiment
- Contemplative Practice