African-Centered Pedagogy: Developing Schools of Achievement for African American Children

CHAPTER FIVE. FROM A COMMUNITY OF CARING TO A COMMUNITY OF ACHIEVEMENT

CHAPTER FIVE FROM A COMMUNITY OF CARING TO A COMMUNITY OF ACHIEVEMENT This is a critical juncture in African history, and every thought and action has the potential for becoming liberating or incarcerating. We can no longer be satisfied with aping the rehashed thoughts and programs of our non-African mentors and teachers. Blackening western philosophical ideas and Eurocentric discourse is far too inadequate for the task of understanding the being, becoming , and belonging of African people. African thinkers must penetrate the puzzles on African terms. We must create the context for our own growth and development . As professionals in service to our people, we must engage in a deep, profound and penetrating search, study, understanding and mastery of the illumination of the African spirit in our time and place. —Wade Nobles, (1995) This chapter interprets the theory of African American educational achievement in terms of existing frameworks on learning communities and culturally responsive teaching—using the notion community of practice to construct an African-centered community of achievement in public schools. I should say at the outset that many such projects already exist as private schools and independent schools, and many are exemplars of African-centered school communities . One example is a network of African-centered school communities called the Council of Independent Black Institutions dedicated to the development of schools as African-centered communities of achievement. Similarly, as of this writing, there are more than 400 African-centered charter schools and over 100 independent schools, most of which are the result of an increasing activism in African American communities that have organized to redress the failures of the public school system to promote and sustain achievement for the children of those communities. Although these schools are independent public schools and private schools, they are a resource to the present project—building an African-centered community of achievement in public schools. The purpose of African-centered pedagogy in these settings is to design education specifically for the needs of African American learners. In these settings, the goal of education is not to prepare children to fit within the present system, but to revolutionize the system toward the promise of democracy articulated in the documents (but not the deeds) that shaped America. The core of social studies, for example, is history approached with a “whole truth” perspective and with agency on behalf of African American children. Rather than being restricted to the text and a chronological march through epochs, teachers appropriate media and reactions to the media—such as the film Amistad or the documentary Africans in America—as the catalyst for instruction on a period of history. A movement history (McDowell & Sullivan, 1993) that critically reinterprets the “lightning rod” incidents in this nation’s history help African American students not only learn the conceptual content, but also to critically contest the inherent contradictions of liberty and equality in America. Because racism is an ideology that positions White people as superior and non-White people as inferior, the pedagogy developed for African American children specifically confronts this ideology to inoculate children from internalizing ideologies of White supremacy. The incompleteness of American education is in the lack of pedagogy to help African American students negotiate their “double-consciousness” and their sense of resistance to institutional authority that supports inequality. African-centered pedagogy seeks to address this by encouraging: (1) deep thought as both the process and the aims of education for liberation, self-agency and self-determination; and (2) community participation in deep thought that furthers and develops those ends. WHY NOT CRITICAL PEDAGOGY? Informed readers might wonder at this juncture about the absence of critical theory or critical pedagogy in the list of five pedagogical approaches of my theory . Critical theory is a theoretical framework and a method of analysis that carefully and systematically critique social structures, cultural institutions, and the otherwise hidden factors of social problems. The framework and method are characterized by the disposition of praxis, which means that value of theory is based upon its relevancy to human enterprises and its location in the activity of those enterprises. This notion of praxis implies an activism in the development of theory and new knowledge. It implies theory building as more 76 AFRICAN-CENTERED PEDAGOGY than an exercise of academics, but based in the human activity of real struggles with real problems in schools. It is a human activity that is discursive, reflective collaborative, and interrogative (constantly...