Developing Empathy Through Storytelling curriculum

Abstract

There is tremendous impact when teachers and school counselors have opportunities for collaboration. Cross-curricular opportunities may already exist among some content area teachers, but there is increasing potential for school counselors to collaborate with teachers’ curriculum. One such opportunity will be the basis of this unit entitled Developing Empathy through Storytelling, in which school counseling lessons will complement the English Language Arts curriculum of a World War II unit. Originally, this graphic novel unit was created for an ELA classroom. However, the potential to teach themes related to both school counseling curriculum and the ELA curriculum can be thought-provoking and powerful. Therefore, this ELA unit has been adapted to be an interdisciplinary unit that incorporates the school counseling curriculum with the ELA curriculum about World War II, with content about the Holocaust as the main driver of this unit’s overall assessment goals.