Students drum life stories: The role of cultural universals in project work

This study describes how a primary school teacher and her students explored multiple means of communication through the use of a project on storytelling and drumming to personalize and translate cultural differences into universal human experiences they could understand. It documents how the teacher and two researchers collaborated with planning and implementing the drumming project so that it integrated social studies with multiple modes of literacy. It discusses how the teacher and researchers examined cultural universals within this project to provide students with a frame of reference to engage in an authentic understanding of diverse cultures within their classrooms. Finally, the study examined the students' work within the actual drumming project.