My students need marvelous African Masks, Painting Supplies and Mask Making Kits to help them comprehend the hearts and minds and memories of colonial-era Africans.
$234 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their face. But what if their face is covered? What if people wear a mask that hides their true emotions, feelings, memories? This is the conundrum I want my students to consider as we read Chinua Achebe's seminal novel, Things Fall Apart.
For my students, the idea of wearing a mask is not a new one.
The majority of them live in the rough neighborhoods of inner city Bronx, NY, and in order to navigate their dangerous environments they must necessarily wear "masks" of toughness, stoicism, and sometimes even anger. The majority of my students come from Hispanic, low-income, single-parent households. And often their parents are unavailable to soften their children's masks because they're working day and night just to make ends meet.
My Project
As we are reading through Achebe's novel about colonialism in Africa, I want my students to associate their own difficulties of living in an inner city with those being faced by the novel's protagonist Okonkwo by creating masks that display both their own experiences and those of Okonkwo. The "masks" that my students often assume are eerily similar to those being worn by Okonkwo and his tribe - hardness, virility, stoicism, and strength. While making their masks, I want my students to express the outer facade that these masks portray to the world, and to understand the circumstances that created this hard exterior. Simultaneously, I also want my students to understand both their own and Okonkwo's vulnerability, humanity, and underlying pain at having to assume these mask in the first place.
Please help fund this project of merging minds and memories via mask-making!
As my students create masks for Okonkwo (and ultimately for themselves), they will come to see that life in colonial Africa is not so different from their own. Moreover, they will realize that sometimes wearing a mask isn't necessary in order to survive; sometimes taking the mask off and exposing the truth beneath is just as important as donning the mask in the first place...
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Cohen and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
