A strengths-based curriculum for Tribal early childhood education to support lifelong health and wellness

/SUMMARY Indigenous communities promote healing, foster community and connectedness, reclaim traditional practices, and engage youth in intergenerational knowledge sharing. Indeed, culturally grounded interventions that focus on cultural strengths and connectedness offer a promising strategy to improve the wellbeing of Indigenous people. Our focus is to bring this strategy into Tribal early childhood education settings because the preschool years are an optimal time to initiate interventions that provide a solid foundation for attainment of lifetime wellness. The ways people are connected to the land, each other, and the Creator is central to Indigenous food sovereignty movements as framed through the lens of relational wellbeing. Our team, Wiba Anung (Early Star), combined these frameworks and the thirteen moons of the Anishinaabe lunar calendar, to develop the Gikinawaabi Child Wellbeing curriculum which seeks to support children to learn Anishinaabe food stories; speak Anishinaabemowin words; grow, gather, prepare, and consume healthy and traditional foods; engage in movement activities; and meet relevant developmental milestones. Wiba Anung is a nearly 20-year partnership between researchers at MSU and the InterTribal Council of Michigan (ITCMI), that serves Michigan Indigenous children and their families. Despite positive feedback on pilot testing, critical questions on the broader impacts of this curriculum on Indigenous early childhood educational settings remain, including (i) identifying if the curriculum effectively improves culturally relevant child outcomes and (ii) determining which factors facilitate or hinder the implementation of these curricular materials. This study seeks to address these gaps through three specific aims. Aim 1 supports the adaptation of culturally grounded measures for early childhood contexts, including the first tool to assess early Indigenous food literacy. Aim 2 uses a stepped wedge cluster randomized controlled trial to test the effectiveness of the Gikinawaabi Child Wellbeing Head Start Curriculum on child outcomes of cognitive, social and emotional, and early relational wellbeing. Aim 3 uses the RE-AIM implementation framework to identify barriers and facilitators to curricular implementation and to conduct a pilot assessment of how individualized teacher mentoring impacts curriculum implementation and child outcomes. Indigenous cultural values link food and community and, when emphasized, have healing and protective effects that can help achieve health and educational wellbeing for children across Indian Country. This project provides a critical foundation for achieving our team’s long-term goal of supporting Indigenous wellbeing by integrating Indigenous foods, land-based learning, and relationality into Tribal early childhood classrooms. Project Number: 1R01HD119707-01 | Fiscal Year: 2025 | NIH Institute/Center: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) | Principal Investigator: Chelsea Wentworth Fournier (+1 co-PI) | Institution: HENRY FORD HEALTH + MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES, EAST LANSING, MI | Award Amount: $679,819 | Activity Code: R01 | Study Section: Special Emphasis Panel[ZRG1 SCIL-L (55)] View on NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/1R01HD11970701