Hear Me! STEM Integrated Project
How do we encourage empathy with our students?
In this STEM Integrated project, the power of music and narrative come together as a way to share each other's stories and understand each other just a little better.
Students will collaborate to produce and publish scored interviews and narratives about their lives. They will also have the opportunity to submit their interviews to the Library of Congress through Story Corp as well as submit their narratives to Snap Judgment, which opens up the possibility of having their stories told on the air via NPR if chosen by the Snap Judgment team.
* CTE Music Technology and Composition: Students will analyze the power of music and narrative. Students will begin by looking at music that they identify with and create mixtapes that can have the power to effect their own personal narrative. Next, students will look at programmatic music and create music for silent films. Then, they will then record spoken word and add music. Finally, they will add sound effects and foley to make the story come to life.
* English Language-Arts: Students will be learning the value of listening to others’ stories through interviewing. They will also be a lesson of empathy, connecting with others, and trying to try on others shoes by rewriting other people’s stories (e.g. interviews) as their own in a creative writing project.
* Special Education / Life Skills: Students will learn the skills to receptively communicate, prepare for an interview and finally participate in an interview to share their personal stories. Introductory lesson will include listening to personal narratives and assessing components that were interesting and detailed. Students will prepare and be interviewed. The interview will share a story meaningful to them in their lives. The course will end with a self assessment of their finished product to determine areas of strengths and weaknesses during their story telling experience. Students will learn skills to help develop expressive communication, promote one’s self and increase self esteem, and increase interviewing skills as a vocational experience.
Culminating Task: Students will be submitting interviews from people in the community to the Library of Congress through the StoryCorp app and will be submitting personal narratives that have been scored with music and sound effects to NPR’s SnapJudgment website.
This project has many “real world” applications. Communicating is a key skill for all successful people in the business world and in academia. For students with social skill deficits, this project will help them further necessary life skills of communicating with people.
Some careers that are related to this project are: journalism, entertainment (e.g. Radio), music engineering, film scoring, foley work, writing, and editing.
This unit is brought to you by Robert Habereder (CTE), Angelina Summers (Special Education), and Alexia Wilson (ELA) with support from the CTE Online curriculum leadership team and detailed coordination provided by the Course Team Lead Gregg Witkin.
