Teaching Modules 
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Teaching Africa and the Middle East in the Great Plains is a grant-funded project supported by the Longview Foundation to prepare and disseminate teacher training and curricular materials on Africa (including aspects of the African Diaspora, North Africa, and related aspects of the Middle East) that address the education standards of Kansas and Missouri, the National History Standards, and the College Board Advanced Placement Program. Center staff will work with a select group of teachers knowledgeable of the standards, guidelines, and benchmarks used in regional K-12 education, on transforming existing instructional materials to bring them into alignment with the formats and themes prioritized in state and national standards and make them more consistent and effective. The project will extend KASC's on-going efforts to develop appropriate, accessible Africa and Middle East-related instructional materials for use by teachers in the Great Plains region. In this first year, the project will focus on high school level materials and resources.
Summer 2006 (July 1 - August 15): Formal organization of the team, the establishment of subgroups, and the development of working strategies. Fall 2006 (August 16 - December 31): Lesson plans will be selected and developed; pilot programs and materials will be presented to appropriate conferences and peer groups; and selected materials will be tested and adapted to State standards. Winter 2007 (January 1 - April 15): The team will work materials into appropriate formats (website, lectures, books, curricular units) and develop assessment methodologies and tools. New materials will be circulated to a wide range of teachers for immediate use in classrooms through workshops. Spring 2007 (April 16 - December 15): Teachers will further test materials in their classrooms. |
Needs and Purposes of Project
Unfortunately, Kansas teachers are currently on their own when they seek to address Africa in their classrooms because no clearing-house for relevant educational content now exists in the states. As a consequence, the materials they use and their approaches to teaching about Africa vary greatly. Starting with the materials it will refine and disseminate in the first year, KASC intends not only to fill this gap, but also to develop and make widely available effective new K-12 materials relevant to the African continent.
The purposes of this project are to:
Work with experienced teachers to identify relevant niches in the State curriculum;
Review and adapt existing lesson plans in KASC's outreach library, online, and at large;
Prepare new materials, including distance learning courses to be offered through KU Continuting Education (KUCE);
Diseeminate materials through professional workshops offered by the Kansas Committee for International Education in the Schools (KCIES), Mid-America Alliance for African Studies (MAAAS), and State Social Studies Conventions;
Work with teachers and USDs to plan strategies for adoption of the materials;
Evaluate the effectiveness of the materials through review of test scores, teacher and student interviews, and expert evaluation by outreach coordinators from other centers.
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