EDUCATION, COMMUNITY AND RACIAL-ETHNIC RELATIONS: EXPERIENCES IN THE UNITED STATES AND MALI

Abstract

Black students, as a group, are underserved by neoliberal policies and poorly resourced urban schools and Black Americans are over-represented in privatized prisons. This article challenges cultural deficit thinking and theorizing about Black children’s language and culture, which have been so pervasive in the U.S. Research discussed in this article interrupts this discourse of Black inferiority and highlights the importance of students developing a critical Black consciousness, which can contribute to their academic and cultural excellence.  Emancipatory pedagogy for human freedom, which supports students’ positive sense of themselves and their racial-ethnic group, is also discussed. Emancipatory teaching for critical Black consciousness and human freedom means recovering history, memory and identity, so students understand the state of Black America from a critical, historical perspective. Education for this kind of consciousness requires connecting students to their family, community history and to their ancestors. Five principles of emancipatory pedagogy are presented that can guide teacher preparation, curriculum, text development, and standards-based instruction and support positive racial-ethnic relationships. These are: conscientization, critique of ideology/critique of racism as ideology, cultural agency/resistance to oppression, dialectical epistemology and teaching through cultural arts. The example of the Songhoy Club, a pedagogical laboratory for heritage teaching for students and doctoral students and engaging parents, demonstrates how teaching Songhoy language and culture connects students with their African heritage, “from the Nile to the Niger to the Neighborhood.” Teaching this heritage is very important given that northern Mali is occupied by Islamic extremists who have destroyed historic cultural artifacts in Timbuktu.

Key words: Black Education; Emancipatory pedagogy; Critical Black consciousness; Racial-ethnic identity.

See also the translation of this article for the Portuguese language in the same issue.