Year-round in-school, after-school, and summer camp cultural arts education workshops for ages 5 to 16. Unique programming has been designed to nurture joy, create excitement, and catalyze creative, physical, social-emotional, and intellectual development.

Read more about the features of each program. We welcome inquiries from schools, grant makers, government agencies, and community arts organizations.

 

Applied Storytelling

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Our curriculum incorporates the District's Arts Education Learning Standards. Storytelling improves self-presentation, organizes the youth's thoughts, strengthens literacy skills, and frequently leads to an increased interest in reading.

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Believing that the mind must be calm before taking in new information, Auntie Oyé starts all sessions with a relaxing activity, including laugh therapy, so that everyone can shake off the troubles of the day and prepare for 90 minutes of exploring new worlds, sounds, ideas, and foods.  "Linking Arts, Health, and Wellness" workshops take place in a safe space where children relax, learn, and perform under the guidance of Black and African drummers, dancers, singers, and performers. 

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What problems is OPH solving:  Poor diets and exposure to chronic poverty and extreme violence put the OPH participants at risk emotionally, academically, and behaviorally.  

The OPH interventions alleviate stress, anxiety, and feelings of isolation. They empower children to learn, laugh, have fun, hone skills, share stories, and socialize during the non-competitive, nurturing, and engaging workshops. Sessions also encourage relationship building among the parent participants who might not otherwise have a chance to interact in a recreational setting.  Several mothers have told Auntie Oyé how they appreciated the opportunity to develop friendships and learn about the heritage of their ancestors. 

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 OPH also strengthens the children's self-image.  Because identity and self-perception play significant roles in effective learning and development, OPH introduces its participants to high-quality teaching artists of color.  The focus of the program is African culture, so the OPH teaching artists are also from Africa.​​

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Culinary Storytelling

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OPH will resume nutrition education and cooking classes, a staple of OPH workshops, paused due to COVID-19 restrictions. OPH will include time to learn about healthy, inexpensive ways to prepare and eat fresh foods. Children will learn to make jollof rice (African mixed vegetable rice), mixed green salad, and fruit salad.  The children will take recipes home and ask their parents to prepare them.  

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 Nutrition education offers new ideas for meals and snacks.  Auntie Oye knows to inform the children that their parents have responded to the children's requests to try the new recipes. The children adopt new ways of speaking and presenting themselves when they put on the chef’s jacket. Culinary Storytelling improves self-presentation, organizes youth’s thoughts, strengthens literacy skills, and frequently leads to an increased interest in reading.

 

Dance and Music

 

​The drum is an extension of the human heart and the heart of the dance. We teach the djembe, a Wes  African percussion hand drum with multiple beats and tones and expose students to other traditional West African percussion instruments. The primary element of the West African percussive tradition is the multiple layers of interlocking rhythmic patterns that produce complex polyrhythmic sounds in different meters simultaneously. Documented medical benefits of drumming include decreased stress, deaccelerated anxiety, increased relaxation, an enhanced immune system, and rhythmic cues that improve spatial temporal skills and dexterity, strengthen memory and concentration, lowers blood pressure, releases endorphins in the brain, and promotes general physical health and wellness. The djembe also helps youth understand African origins in the world of music around them that enrich American culture such as the beats and rhythms in African American spirituals, blues, be-bop, jazz, R&B, soul, hip-hop, and rap.

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• Joseph Soh Ngwa, a master drum instructor, teaches hand and finger techniques and traditional percussion rhythms to children and youth in schools, workshops, and community programs. His teaching fosters cognitive, physical, and social development, encouraging creative expression, stress relief, emotional channeling, and building self-awareness, cooperation, patience, confidence, and self-worth.

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• Madison Moyer is an art educator who guides students through the fundamentals of portrait drawing, helping them build confidence as they develop technical skills and personal expression. Through her work with Oyè Palaver Hut, she blends her passions for art and teaching, drawing on her experience as a special education paraprofessional and a summer art camp director.

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• Domonique Mobley leads art classes where students explore diverse mediums, create works for exhibitions, and document their creative progress. Drawing on a lifelong passion for art nurtured since childhood, she now shares her experience and inspires young people to express and develop their own creativity through Oyè Palaver Hut.

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