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

CHAPTER TWO. TRADITIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN EDUCATION—A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

CHAPTER TWO TRADITIONS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN EDUCATION—A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Regardless of the poignancy of the crimes against black Americans our oppression is, after all, only a part of a much larger malignancy. The American structure of slavery was a consequence of the economy of the New World, its roots in Europe, not Africa. Mass oppression for mass production is part of the Western psyche. Therefore the problems experienced by blacks in America have to be seen as part of that larger malady. It is impossible to extricate the black experience in America from the larger American experience. —Walter Mosley, Workin’ on the Chain Gang There is a cultural integrity in the way that African American families and communities construe quality education, exemplary teachers, and academic achievement. African Americans have a collective history and a collective memory that circumscribe a significant and tangible cultural heritage. In this cultural heritage, views on school achievement are not necessarily consistent with the “standard model” of traditional education. Therefore, building a successful community of practice in a school populated predominantly by African American children calls for a critical redefinition of good teaching and successful learning. It requires a critical interrogation of those individual proficiencies and abilities required for school success. In short, the task of building a community of achievement requires a new pedagogy—an Africancentered pedagogy. My task in this chapter is to make clear what I mean about historical grounding and why it is important to envisioning pedagogy for successful work with African American children. I want to make three points in this discussion regarding the meaning of an African-centered historical grounding with respect to the task. First, there is a definitive cultural and intellectual heritage that has emerged from the collective experiences of African Americans and that it has an important relationship to what education truly means in the collective memory of descendants of Africans in America. Second, without a grounding in the collective experience and collective heritage of African Americans, the ideologies of oppression that have evolved in the United States will continue to shape educational practices inimical to Black achievement. The third point I will make as a challenge to the following statement: The system of public education in American generally works, but works much less well for African American learners. A more truthful rendering of this statement is as follows: The system of public education in America generally works well for a select segment of the population, principally because it fails a disproportionate percentage of American students. In other words, if we understand American history and the ideology that drives American public education, we have to acknowledge that public schooling is doing absolutely what it was designed to do—to sort and select learners in a way that ascribes their prerogatives and opportunity. These three points are essential to building the system of practices and will help students make connections with their racial, cultural, and national identities. I start this discussion of the historically grounded aspect of pedagogy with a set of African-centered assumptions and understandings that clarify the political and cultural realities of the schooling of Black children in White America. Scholars in a variety of disciplines have traced and studied the origins and linkages of African American culture in the regions of the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast around the Niger River delta. It is fairly well established that western African societies and nations were the predominant groups that fell victim to the slave trade, so most African Americans originated from that region. (Of the some 20 million people kidnapped in this slave trading, only half would survive the trek to the coast.) What is of interest in this scholarship are the cultural features and qualities of western African societies that have persisted, sometimes in transmuted forms that are distinct, recognizable, and significant in the organization of Black life to this day. It is important to trace the ways in which the cultural forms of Africans in America powerfully shaped the emerging cultural forms of America as a whole. The complete story of American history, the deep structure of the American culture and society, lies in the symbiotic relationship between American institutions and African culture. Historian George Rawick (1972) details the history of African Americans as they persisted through slavery , drawing on the wealth of slave narratives from the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration to show the resiliency and the re-creation of African culture in ways that became uniquely...