AFRICAN TALES (TECHNOLOGY AND LEARNING IN EVERY SCHOOL)
A MULTIDISCIPLINARY APPROACH FOR CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT
African TALES (Technology and Learning in Every School) seeks to help teachers infuse multimedia technology into the school curriculum. At the heart of TALES is a professional development model that utilizes new ways of storytelling to equip pre-service and in-service teachers with the latest technology and trains them to use it effectively in their classrooms. African TALES utilizes the digital format as a new medium for the age-old practice of storytelling in a model that is humanistic, culturally rich, and globally relevant. African TALES explores the connections among storytelling, imagery, symbols and symbolism and examines how teachers can use art objects with storytelling activities in the classroom.
The African TALES project seeks to provide professional development to pre-service and in-service teachers to enhance teaching and impact students through the seamless infusion of educational technology into classrooms and through curriculum integration. The purpose of African TALES (Technology And Learning in Every School) is to design and implement an exemplary model of professional development in which teachers become more thoughtful, innovative learners infusing multimedia technology into the school curriculum.
Participating with faculty, pre-service and in-service teachers, parents, and community members, students will acquire language, mathematics, science, technology, social studies, and literacy skills while designing interdisciplinary multimedia learning experiences built around the traditions, customs, beliefs, and legends that stories encode.
African TALES is based on a constructivist philosophy—a philosophy that asserts that students learn from what they do. In other words, a learner constructs knowledge by participating actively with new ideas, new concepts, and new tools.
Partners in the African TALES project believe that multimedia technologies have the potential to engage students in active learning. Digital cameras, computers, and software applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Pinnacle Studio, and the Internet will allow students to interact with new concepts in self-directed and unique ways.
By providing equipment and training to pre-service and in-service teachers, African TALES hopes to offer an alternative to the book-and-pencil classroom, an alternative that may engage students disenfranchised by a more traditional learning experience.
African TALES combines several technology-based tools to implement a comprehensive, wide-scale model of teacher training and classroom support, administrator involvement, and increased student participation.
Why storytelling, and why do it digitally?
With growing interest in storytelling across many sectors of society, the African Tales project offers an important link to narrative art. In African storytelling, word and image go hand in hand. African storytelling uses rich visual metaphors for immediate sensory effects. It utilizes improvisation, critical thinking skills. There is visual-verbal nexus in African arts. In this nexus, crafts (such as weaving textile design, woodcarving, ceramics, and architecture) link symbols and designs to stories and other verbal genres of the rich African oral literature.
What are the expected outcomes?
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