Pilot program brings West Africa to local classrooms

When Leslie Roberts returned from a trip to Ghana, she wore a dress made for her by a seamstress there to her music classroom at Weddington Hills Elementary School in Concord.

Several of her students got excited about the African garment, but one little girl in particular couldn’t stop beaming. That girl’s parents hail from Ghana, and she had traveled to the country a few times to visit family.

“She was really excited when I was telling her about my trip,” Roberts said. “She was just like, ‘Oh, I love this dress,’ and just feeling a sense of representation to see that I was going to teach the class about her culture.”

That kind of poignant student-teacher connection was made possible by a comprehensive UNC-Chapel Hill project designed to create digital lesson plans on contemporary Africa for elementary school students.

Funded by a $500,000 grant from the Oak Foundation in 2021, the project is led by Carolina’s African Studies Center. Other collaborators include University Libraries, the UNC School of Education, faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences and elementary school teachers across North Carolina.

Teachers of social studies, arts and music, like Roberts, had the opportunity to travel to Senegal and Ghana to tour the countries, interview locals and gather information, as well as photos and videos, to create lesson plans. Those lessons live in a digital repository, available for any elementary school teacher to use.

“There’s been overwhelmingly positive responses to this material,” said Laura Cox, outreach manager for the African Studies Center. “I think it does what the center hoped to accomplish, which was addressing misconceptions, inaccuracies and stereotypes about the African continent and replacing them with something deeper and doing that in creative and accessible ways that encourage hands-on and tactile learning.

“Even though these are digital resources, you have students who are making art or making music, who are drawing connections between their lives and lives of people in West Africa.”

Teachers have been creative with how they share the material, like Roberts wearing a Ghanan-made dress before teaching about the country’s music and dance.

Erica Luetzow-Coward, a cultural studies teacher at Club Boulevard Elementary in Durham, said she was inspired by seeing cocoa production during her trip to Ghana and knew her students would love to learn more about it. She also taught a lesson about Muslim scholar Omar ibn Said, who was enslaved from West Africa and brought to America. Luetzow-Coward told her students about the mosque named after Said in nearby Fayetteville and pointed it out to them on a map, creating a connection between their state and Senegal.

The UNC School of Education vetted the lesson plans before turning them over to faculty experts in African studies in the College for additional screening. Later this summer, a group of educators will return to Ghana and Senegal to workshop their lessons for local teachers and ensure that the material is authentic.

These fact-gathering trips equip teachers with recent, accurate material to share with their students, and those lessons help students expand their worldview.

“I think we should be doing anything we can right now to be promoting kids making those connections, not being isolated, realizing that you’ve got a lot to learn from other people,” Luetzow-Coward said.

“They see different things, and then they start reflecting on what their town looks like or why we do things this way. We always talk about how something isn’t better or worse – it’s just different.”