All-Student Enrichment · Grades 7–8
Voice, listening, memory, craft, performance, and ethical community stories
Students study how stories travel through oral performance, print, image, music, theatre, comics, and digital media. Akan Ananse traditions, African diasporic storytelling, New Orleans voices, family knowledge, contemporary fiction, and student imagination become contexts for craft—always with source attribution, consent, and alternatives to personal disclosure.
Students practice attention, paraphrase, response, turn-taking, and respectful silence. Communication differences, AAC, processing time, and non-speaking participation are treated as part of the storytelling community.
Students identify who told, recorded, translated, adapted, or published a story and how power, audience, migration, and medium may change it.
Students may create fiction or use public, teacher-vetted sources. Disability, family history, grief, migration, religion, violence, or identity is never demanded as the price of authentic work.
Implementation standard: Oral-history, recording, photography, publication, and cultural adaptation follow written consent and source procedures. Teachers review media for age appropriateness, distinguish Akan or Asante-specific material from broader African or diasporic traditions, and consult culture bearers when context is uncertain.
Listen actively and identify sequence, character, setting, conflict, pattern, point of view, theme, and performance choices.
Plan, draft, rehearse, revise, and present original oral, written, visual, dramatic, or digital narratives.
Use voice, pacing, gesture, repetition, imagery, dialogue, sound, and audience awareness purposefully.
Research Akan Ananse stories and African diasporic transformations with accurate source and cultural notes.
Conduct or analyze an ethical interview or oral-history process with consent, boundaries, and faithful representation.
Curate and publish accessible stories using captions, transcripts, alt text, audio description, plain-language summaries, or AAC.
Essential question: What helps a group listen closely enough for every storyteller to belong?
Core learning: community agreements; turn-taking; AAC access; beginning-middle-end; character wants; conflict; sequence; retell versus interpretation; feedback
Essential question: Why do trickster stories entertain, challenge power, and change as they travel?
Core learning: Ananse in Akan and Asante contexts; trickster patterns; humor; consequences; oral variation; translation; diaspora; attribution; adaptation choices
Essential question: How can a place hold many true, remembered, and imagined stories?
Core learning: neighborhood; soundscape; public history; folklore; point of view; setting detail; maps; primary and secondary sources; fact versus invention
Essential question: How does a medium change the way an audience experiences a story?
Core learning: voice; gesture; pacing; music and sound rights; storyboard; recording; editing; captions; transcript; credits; audience testing
Essential question: Who has the right to change a story, and what responsibilities follow?
Core learning: adaptation; public domain; copyright awareness; cultural ownership; perspective shift; translator and collector roles; stereotypes; source notes; permission
Essential question: How do storytellers use truth, invention, and possibility without confusing them?
Core learning: memory and reliability; scene; reflection; character arc; worldbuilding; African and diasporic futures; New Orleans resilience; labels for fiction and nonfiction
Essential question: How can an interviewer preserve another person’s meaning without taking ownership of it?
Core learning: research; open questions; informed consent; recording permission; active listening; transcription; verification; editing boundaries; withdrawal; archive choices
Essential question: How can a community share stories while protecting access, credit, and privacy?
Core learning: curation; sequence; hosting; publicity; content notes; accessibility; permissions; metadata; credits; audience feedback; preservation; takedown plan
Daily practice: Instruction may combine mini-lessons, visuals, movement, music, hands-on materials, role-play, small groups, assistive technology, independent work, and teacher conferencing. Pacing changes when student evidence shows a need for reteaching, more practice, or extension.
Students trace one story pattern through a clearly sourced Akan or Asante version and one diasporic version, noting continuity, change, collector, translator, and context.
Students use fictional or low-risk scenarios to practice listening, naming impact, imagining repair, and keeping private information outside the public performance.
Students combine public history, field observation, maps, and licensed or original sound to create an accessible place narrative.
Students serve as storytellers, interviewers, editors, performers, access coordinators, hosts, archivists, and consent reviewers.
Progress reports identify what a student can do independently, with a prompt, with a model, or with direct assistance. Reports also name the next teachable step and the supports that improve access.
Students receive a new explanation, adjusted materials, additional guided practice, and another reasonable opportunity to demonstrate growth.
Picture cards, timelines, character maps, color-coded structure, sentence frames, and storyboard templates support planning.
Students may speak, sign, use AAC, type, draw, animate, act, select recorded lines, direct a partner, or combine modes.
Scripts, model performances, repeated practice, previewed audiences, clear time limits, and opt-in recording reduce performance uncertainty.
Quiet presentation spaces, reduced lighting, headphones, breaks, asynchronous recording, and audience-size choices support regulation.
Bilingual work, captions, transcripts, vocabulary preview, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and plain-language summaries broaden participation.
Rubrics focus on stated craft choices. Peers do not evaluate a student’s disability, accent, family, identity, trauma, or willingness to disclose.
Individualization: Teachers follow each student’s IEP, present levels, accommodations, communication system, behavior or safety plans, assistive-technology needs, and specially designed instruction. Independence is never confused with withholding necessary support.
A powerful story does not cancel the teller’s right to privacy, credit, context, or withdrawal.
Permission to interview is not automatically permission to record, publish, edit, post online, or preserve permanently. Each use is explained and documented.
Students name the teller, community, collector, translator, adapter, archive, and publication when known and acknowledge uncertainty rather than inventing a clean origin.
Students may use fiction, public oral histories, historical sources, or teacher-created scenarios. No grade depends on sharing trauma, diagnosis, family conflict, religion, or private identity.
Teachers use these sources as planning references, then adapt instruction to Aberewa students, local requirements, current safety guidance, and the expertise of qualified educators and community partners.
Museum context for shared and changing storytelling traditions across African-descended communities in the Americas.
An archival collection used critically by naming the recorder, adaptation history, time period, and limitations.
Examples and educator resources connecting comics, graphic narrative, reading, and diverse audiences.
Current introductory guidance explaining that fair use depends on circumstances rather than a fixed percentage rule.
Students may invite a willing relative, elder, artist, librarian, culture bearer, or community member to tell a public story or discuss storytelling practice. The contributor chooses whether recording is allowed, reviews the use, receives credit, and may set limits. A public-source option carries equal academic value.
Privacy and choice: Family participation is welcomed but never required for a student to succeed. Students may use teacher-provided examples whenever sharing household, financial, health, cultural, or personal information would be uncomfortable or unsafe.
← Return to the complete curriculum