Nia: Engaging African-American Adolescent Females in Legacy, Learning, and Leading

Main objective

To create a series of teaching units to engage African-American middle school youth in culture by exploring self (identity), community, and socio-political realities through popular culture, education, and youth development theory and approaches.

Goals

• To expose youth to a quality youth development experience focused on self and community exploration through the dissemination of information, discussions, activities, and interacting with elders to increase self and community awareness.

• To fully incorporate popular culture ideology and approaches to the teaching and learning experience.

• To create units to be be implemented a youth development setting.

• To test out the teaching unit in “real life” to gauge its effectiveness and aid in future revisions.

Audience

African-American middle and early high school females participating in the Cultural Wellness Center—St. Paul’s Saturday Day school. The mission of CWC is “to unleash the power of citizens to heal themselves and to build community.”

Research

The following research base will be used to better understand identity development and further develop this teaching unit:

Already in place:

· Identity development research and implications—work by Drs. William Cross, Beverly Tatum, and Joy Leary

o What is identity?

o How is it formed?

o How to best impact identity development?

· Developmental theory—to develop an age appropriate learning experience

· Learning style theory—an attempt to fully engage all learners in content

· Traditional African values, ways of being and relating, cultures, etc.

· The experience of the African in America—and historical and contemporary analysis

Other questions to ponder?

• Pedagogy: how will this units be implemented?
• Buy-in: Conveying to youth the value of this lesson and why they should consider being involved?
• What needs to be included?
• How long does the unit need to take?
• What are measures of success?
• How to best gather input from middle school students themselves?

Timeline

I see this project rolling out in four major phases, timeframes for completion follow.

1) Research, focusing the topic, and decide on teaching methodologies (now to March 19^th)

2) Actual constructing of consecutive lessons to be taught within the unit (March 19^th – April 2^nd)

3) “Testing” of parts of the unit and revisions (April 2^nd – 16^th)

4) Final revisions and submission (April 16^th – April 30^th)