Associate Professor Cheryl Bolick will take part in a project funded with a $500,000 grant to produce learning resources about contemporary Africa for K-5 classrooms.
The project, funded by the Oak Foundation, will create lesson plans and user guides and other content to be used by elementary school teachers.
Bolick will work in the project with Carolina’s African Studies Center, guiding teams of scholars and educators to identify and curate content for an online repository. She will then work with teams to develop curricular materials to accompany the resources in the repository. The project also will include an evaluation of the implementation of the collection and its dissemination, Bolick said.
The center’s associate director, Ada Umenwaliri, said: “The strategy of digitizing up-to-date content in this pilot program will align with pedagogical best practices and the hybrid models of classroom-based and remote learning. By creating accessible, interactive, and current web-based resources, ASC’s outreach to schools will significantly increase. The ASC anticipates the project will be replicable for older students as it progresses.”
The lesson plans and user guides will include materials about social studies, arts, and music.
“This grant will allow us to expand our work into local classrooms across the state and beyond. We expect that our efforts will lead to an increase in the knowledge and engagement of contemporary Africa,” Umenwaliri said.
The Oak Foundation is a global grant-making foundation based in Geneva that funds work to address issues of global, social, and environmental concern.