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

PREFACE

PREFACE Education is the practice of assisting people to find agency in, and responsibility for, the struggle for freedom. This book is a practical guide to teaching and learning. The book is written specifically for teachers of African American children who are struggling to translate contemporary educational theory into successful practice, given the demands and constraints of public schooling in urban America. I wish to reach all those who are invested in the academic achievement and personal development of African American children, including teachers, school administrators , scholars, and researchers, as well as parents and community members. The book presents an instructional theory for successful work with African American children that integrates the historical, cultural, political, and developmental considerations of the African American experience into a unified system of practice for the educational achievement of African American children. The book brings to light those principles of good practice that already exist and links them to contemporary ideas and innovations that apply to effective practice in African American communities. The theory of teaching and learning is called “African-centered pedagogy” and has been shaped by more than twenty-five years of teaching, community organizing, and research in and around urban schools and communities. This African-centered pedagogy for effective teaching is based on a critical reinterpretation and appropriation of several key educational frameworks (e.g., constructivist teaching, responsive teaching, child-centered learning, cognitively guided instruction) and innovations (e.g., project-based learning, cooperative learning). In this book I demonstrate why these frameworks and innovations have not yet made an impact on efforts to elevate the academic achievement and personal development for African Americans. Individually, the innovations and frameworks are basically good ideas. But as systems of instruction they are inadequate for improving the quality of education for African American children. I therefore provide the reader with a unifying conceptual framework. I incorporate these innovations in an active theory of effective teaching—a pedagogy of success— for the achievement and development of African American children in school contexts. Finally, the book illustrates the application of the theory through case study analyses of accomplished practice in both instructional settings and professional settings to demonstrate the development of a community of achievement for African American children. An effective pedagogy should provide teachers with a unifying framework for how they are to apply understanding of human cognition, learning, and development . The African-centered pedagogy presented in this volume does just that, but also guides teachers in how to situate those understandings in practice —and to use these situated understandings to take full account of the lives, histories, cultures, and worldviews of children in diverse urban communities. African-Centered Pedagogy is an instructional theory designed to serve as a guide to practice, as it reveals to teachers how to circumvent the deep-seated, uncontested structures of inequality in schooling that pose barriers to quality education for African American children. I will address how to recognize and confront these barriers in our own work contexts, in our own thinking and in our own training as teachers of African American children. This work focuses on practice—the site of teaching and learning—and how to get results in the actual conditions under which teachers and students interact with one another. How do teachers acquire proficiencies and the knowledge-in-practice required for successful of teaching African American children in a culturally responsive manner? How do teachers acquire, and then use, this awareness to improve their teaching practice? What specific changes can teachers make in how they organize classroom life, assess learning achievement , and support learning activity that will result in quality education for African American children? These are the questions I take up and address in this volume. I draw on an emerging research literature on culturally responsive teaching , incorporating what we already know about the social and cultural contexts that maximize African American children’s learning, cognitive development, and identity formation. However, this effort charts a new direction by exploring what culturally relevant teaching looks like as a system of institutional and professional practice. What follows is the development of such a system for successful work with African American children. With this system , called African-centered pedagogy, you will be able to visualize and develop accomplished practice in your work with African American children. The idea of practice is central to the African-centered pedagogy. I need to make clear at the outset that I use the term in a way different from everyday use in the profession...