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

CHAPTER NINE. TEACHING FOR UNDERSTANDING, LEARNING FOR LIBERATION

CHAPTER NINE TEACHING FOR UNDERSTANDING, LEARNING FOR LIBERATION In accord with their revolutionary origins, Americans celebrate the rebels who created their Republic, naming cities, monuments, broad boulevards, endless highways and numberless schools in their honor. No city, boulevard, highway or public school appears to bear the name of any of the slave insurrectionists who struck violently for their liberty and that of their people, although they often brandished the same principles and employed the same tactics as the Republic’s revolutionary founders. When attempts are made to honor them in the manner accorded others who rebelled in the name of liberty, they are denounced and compared to Herod, Attila and, inevitably , Hitler. Their stories tend to be ‘’buried history ,’’ to borrow a phrase from the dust jacket of David Robertson’s new study of Denmark Vesey, the Charleston, S.C., black who in 1822 organized what arguably was the largest and most intricate slave conspiracy in American history. —Ira Berlin, New York Times Book Review Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciation agitation, Are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; Or it may be a physical one; Or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It ever did and it never will. —Fredrick Douglass, Speech on West India Emancipation (In Hale-Benson, 1982, p. viii.) This chapter develops the concept of a critical literacy in the African-centered pedagogy. The significance of “Blackness” in the White literary imagination—as well as in the symbols, emblems and icons of “Blackness” in popular culture—is examined in the context of development of literacy learning for African American children. This chapter extends the idea teaching for understanding and makes the most important “understanding performance” the exercise of critical literacy. Teachers will see ways of teaching for understanding in relation to critical literacy . As I have said, there are a number of descriptions of what an African-centered pedagogy should be like (Addae, 1996; Akoto, 1992; Ani, 1994; King, 1994; Lee, 1994; Murrell, 1993, 1997). The task now is to examine the literacy learning activities of an entire school as a community of practice that systematically enacts the pedagogy. The case study to follow illustrates the conceptual underpinnings of an African-centered community of practice (Lave, 1988). The chapter first describes critical literacy in the African-centered pedagogy, then examines it in relation to literacy development, and then will finally illustrates the framework in the professional deliberations of educators who are appraising literacy instruction practices. LITERACY LEARNING IN THE AFRICAN-CENTERED PEDAGOGY The discourse practices of the teacher in the African-centered school of achievement should include the oral tradition in African American heritage and the competence of orality or discourse-in-use. Critical literacy in the Africancentered pedagogical framework includes both literacy as traditionally defined and as orality. Gordon and Thomas (1990) argued the need for this expanded notion of literacy for African American education. Literacy on this account refers to both literacy as traditionally defined—the capacity to decode and interpret written language—and orality. They define orality as “the capacity to receive, generate, and express feelings, signals, descriptors, ideas and concepts through language” (p. 71). The broad range of critical literature and orality includes: 136 AFRICAN-CENTERED PEDAGOGY • Multicontextual and multilingual communication—the capacity to communicate in a variety of contexts using multiple symbols; • Multicultural adaptive competence—the capacity to function in more than one culture; • Tertiary signal system mastery of alphabetic and numeric formulae— the capacity to use symbols to represent symbols (in terms of literacy, this involves the more complex capacity to use symbols to represent symbols to the extent that an individual can generate alphabetic or numeric formulae, use metaphors, and use abstract phenomena to represent other abstract phenomena); • Scientific and technological literacy—the capacity to read and understand scientific and technological material; • Political economic literacy—the capacity to understand the interlocutory , systematic alignments which sustain and reinforce race, class, and gender biases within the larger society; • Social and interpersonal literacy—the capacity to manipulate and interpret quantitative data; • Cultural literacy—In contrast to the usages of conservative writers as knowing American culture, the more appropriate use of the term “cultural literacy” refers to...