African Diaspora Literacy by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 6

A Call for “Work Woke” Educators

Actuating Diaspora Literacy to Raise Critical Consciousness

Gwenda Greene

KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS

•Critical Consciousness—the awakening of real components of oppressive situations; learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality (Freire, 1968/2000).

•Emancipatory Pedagogy—teaching in a manner that is informed by African worldviews, cosmologies, philosophies, and cultural concepts and practices of African diasporan people. This pedagogical approach is intended to be used as a way to liberate and heal African students whom have been viewed and taught from Eurocratic perspectives (King & Swartz, 2016).

•Parallel Thinking—a critical and creative thinking strategy for which a group of people work together to address a problem, issue, or challenge (DiYanni, 2015).

•Woke—being aware, and “knowing what’s going on in the community.” It also mentions its specific ties to racism and social injustice (Foley, 2016).

•Work Woke—moving from the awareness of injustices to using your talents to apply actions for solving issues of injustice (beBATONROUGE, 2018).

UNFOLDING MY CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Starting in 2016, I traveled three consecutive years to West Africa: twice to Cameroon and then Ghana. For my 2016 travel to Cameroon, I went with a group of higher education professionals whose purpose was to share educational research and teaching strategies at an international conference. I demonstrated tools used to teach the concept of parallel thinking to students as a component in a critical and creative thinking course at the historically Black institution where I work. As a demonstration of learning, students were responsible for applying the concept using the text of Martin Luther King’s (2015) Letter from Birmingham Jail. I shared with the Cameroonian scholars some of the realities that transpired in the process of teaching the concept that I introduced:

1.The millennial students’ lack of historical knowledge—I cringed about millennial students’ knowledge of history and complained of their inability to fully engage scholarly discussions of inalienable rights, voting, and liberty in the 1960s. For example, upon a review of Letter from Birmingham Jail, I was taken aback by students’ response to a query of King’s purpose in writing the letter which they said was to help “free” the black people in Alabama from slavery.

2.Making the learning relevant—The decision to use the movie Selma (Webb & DuVernay, 2014) as a teaching tool to provide the visual vistas students needed of the original historical, cultural, and ideological contexts presented in King’s letter. Directed by Ava DuVernay, Selma was a blockbuster movie in 2014 of the quest for civil rights by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and protestors who pressed forward toward the epic march from Selma to Montgomery, and their efforts culminating in President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Shortly after returning from Cameroon, I received the news from the US Department of Education of the second opportunity to travel to Cameroon in 2017, this time as a Fulbright-Hays Groups Study Abroad participant. I spent nearly seven months preparing through planning and rigorous study of diaspora literacy. Shared in a study session, “Diaspora literacy is Black people’s knowledge of their (collective) story and cultural dispossession.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.