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CHAPTER ONE THE WRONG FRAMES FOR THE RIGHT PROBLEM What manner of education will provide AfricanAmericans with the voice to sing the scared liturgy of their own culture? What manner of education will mold the African personality to thrive in a culture that demeaned its character, denied its existence and coordinated in its destruction? How shall we sing our sacred song in a strange land? This is the fundamental contradiction that stands before African-centered pedagogy in the United States. —Carol D. Lee, African-Centered Pedagogy: Complexities and Possibilities Schooling is a process intended to perpetuate and maintain the society’s existing power relations and the institutional structures that support those arrangements . Education, in contrast to schooling, is the process of transmitting from one generation to the next knowledge of the values, aesthetics, spiritual beliefs , and all things that give a particular cultural orientation its uniqueness. —Mwalimu Shujaa Writing this book has been, in a sense, a journey home. It has been a process of coming to a deep sense of quality education from a belated (but intentional) rediscovery of African American intellectual and cultural traditions. Who I am as an educator is a reflection of the wisdom and educational experience of my mother and father. Who I am as an educator is, therefore, also a reflection of the struggles of my parents to get an education. My mother grew up and attended public school in the urban north in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My father grew up and attended public school in Glasgow, Kentucky. Both came up in the era of segregation and their respective experiences epitomize the two metaphors of Black achievement in a northern industrial setting and a southern , small town segregated setting. The contrast of experiences in a Jim Crow southern town and a larger northern industrial city is key in the construction of who I am as an educator. It is a coming of age as an African American educator—first as a high school teacher, then as a community college instructor, and finally as a university professor—that I experienced a gradual rekindling of a truly Africanist conception of Black education. Preparing this book was the realization of a sojourn away from a northern, culturally mainstream education with no cultural Black presence—indeed, no Black people for the most part (I did not have a Black teacher until graduate school). That sojourn was toward truly African-centered educational practice through the cultural ways of African Americans as represented in the southern roots of my parents and kin. The sojourn is one of coming to cultural ways of African Americans as the progeny of a northern school system entering the figured world of southern Black educational traditions. My first inklings that there was a rich cultural integrity to African American perspective on education was in an African American Baptist Church and the experience of learning in Sunday School and the comparisons to public school. The congregation, probably the oldest in Milwaukee at that time, was constituted almost entirely of recent émigrés from Arkansas, Mississippi, and other southern states. The Sunday school teachers were not professionally trained teachers. Their approach to teaching the “text of the day” would probably elicit criticism from professional educators regarding ways of improving their “delivery of the content.” Despite whatever they lacked in formal teacher training, the experience of the “lesson” from these Sunday school teachers was noticeably richer than anything I experienced in the public school. At the time I really noticed the this richness of meaning—I really thought about the text and its meaning—something I did much less well in school. The public school I attended was all White. My sister and I were the first African American children to attend the school. I started in kindergarten and my sister in third grade. I noticed, even at this young age, the contrast in my Sunday school experience to the then highly regarded elementary school. The school was bright and well-resourced with the best teachers. The rooms were spacious, the books new, and the materials plentiful. In contrast, the church basement was dark and smelled of mildew in the damp corners serving as the storage areas. It seemed decidedly unlike school: The set up was a series of metal folding chairs in one of four partitions in the basement, rudely cordoned off with old blackboards. The “classrooms” of Sunday school were made thus. 4 AFRICAN-CENTERED PEDAGOGY [18.222.163.31] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 13:03...

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