Black Education

A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century

Joyce E. King, Joyce E. King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135602789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume presents the findings and recommendations of the American Educational Research Association's (AERA) Commission on Research in Black Education (CORIBE) and offers new directions for research and practice. By commissioning an independent group of scholars of diverse perspectives and voices to investigate major issues hindering the education of Black people in the U.S., other Diaspora contexts, and Africa, the AERA sought to place issues of Black education and research practice in the forefront of the agenda of the scholarly community. An unprecedented critical challenge to orthodox thinking, this book makes an epistemological break with mainstream scholarship. Contributors present research on proven solutions--best practices--that prepare Black students and others to achieve at high levels of academic excellence and to be agents of their own socioeconomic and cultural transformation. These analyses and empirical findings also link the crisis in Black education to embedded ideological biases in research and the system of thought that often justifies the abject state of Black education.Written for both a scholarly and a general audience, this book demonstrates a transformative role for research and a positive role for culture in learning, in the academy, and in community and cross-national contexts. Volume editor Joyce E. King is the Benjamin E. Mays Endowed Chair of Urban Teaching, Learning and Leadership at Georgia State University and was chair of CORIBE. Additional Resources
Black Education [CD-ROM]
Research and Best Practices 1999-2001
Edited by
Joyce E. King
Georgia State University
Informed by diverse perspectives and voices of leading researchers, teacher educators and classroom teachers, this rich, interactive CD-ROM contains an archive of the empirical findings, recommendations, and best practices assembled by the Commission on Research in Black Education. Dynamic multi-media presentations document concrete examples of transformative practice that prepare Black students and others to achieve academic and cultural excellence. This CD-ROM was produced with a grant from the SOROS Foundation, Open Society Institute.
0-8058-5564-5 [CD-ROM] / 2005 / Free Upon Request A Detroit Conversation [Video]
Edited by
Joyce E. King
Georgia State University In this 20-minute video-documentary a diverse panel of educators--teachers, administrators, professors, a "reform" Board member, and parent and community activists--engage in a "no holds barred" conversation about testing, teacher preparation, and what is and is not working in Detroit schools, including a school for pregnant and parenting teens and Timbuktu Academy. Concrete suggestions for research and practice are offered.
0-8058-5625-0 [Video] / 2005 / $10.00 A Charge to Keep [Video]
The Findings and Recommendations of te AERA Commission on Research in Black Education
Edited by
Joyce E. King
Georgia State University This 50-minute video documents the findings and recommendations of the Commission on Research in Black Education (CORIBE), including exemplary educational approaches that CORIBE identified, cameo commentaries by Lisa Delpit, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Kathy Au, Donna Gollnick, Adelaide L. Sanford, Asa Hilliard, Edmund Gordon and others, and an extended interview with Sylvia Wynter.
0-8058-5626-9 [Video] / 2005 / $10.00

Part I: Theorizing Transformative Black Education Research and Practice

INTRODUCTION

If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon Black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself.

—Wendell Berry

In contrast to prevailing explanations of the crisis in Black education that attribute “school failure” to presumed deficiencies in Black students’ culture, behavior, attitudes, or their families and communities (in the United States and elsewhere), the theoretical analyses presented in the first section of this volume transcend this omnipresent mainstream discourse. Part I demonstrates powerful culturally nurturing educational practice and research paradigms in analyses that project what is transformative about Black education, not only for people of African ancestry but for humanity more generally as well. What do transformative Black education and research mean in practice? Transformative refers to fundamental requisites of human freedom that are implicated in the educational and life circumstances of people of African descent. One important implication is a primary focus of this volume: The abysmal state of Black education on a global scale indicates not Black people’s deficiencies but the actual extent rather than the West’s espoused values of freedom, humanism, and democracy.

Joyce E. King begins her examination of two crucial questions that delineate this transformative vision of Black education in Chapter 1, “A Transformative Vision of Black Education for Human Freedom.” In this chapter, King discusses alternatives to inclusion in the prevailing hegemonic cultural system that is sustained by the processes of schooling. The first question King discusses is: “What has happened to the Black education and socialization agenda?” This chapter describes the cultural alienation and annihilation in education and educational research as principal factors that have undermined educational excellence traditions that African people have instituted and practiced as part of our human experience. Next, in Chapter 2, King addresses the second question: How can research become one of the forms of struggle for Black education? Chapter 2 presents the fundamental consensus that emerged during the Commission’s deliberations: a “Declaration of Intellectual Independence for Human Freedom.” This declaration consists of Ten Vital Principles of Black Education and Socialization and four precepts that are illustrated by scholarship and research exemplars under the headings of these Articles: (1) Expanding Human Understanding; (2)Nurturing Cultural Consciousness; (3) Resisting Hegemony/ Domination/Dispossession Culturally; and (4) Using a Liberatory Cultural Orientation as an Analytical/Pedagogical Tool. A Glossary of Terms found in Chapter 1 and 2 is presented in Appendix C (Hill & King).

1: A Transformative Vision of Black Education for Human Freedom

Joyce E. King

Georgia State University

I knew nothing about my own historical reality, except in negative terms that would have made it normal for me, as Fanon points out, both to want to be a British subject and, in so wanting, to be anti-black, anti-everything I existentially was. I knew what it was to experience a total abjection of being. A Foucault would never have experienced that, in those terms.

—Sylvia Wynter (Scott, 2000, p. 188)

[A]t the very time when it most often mouths the word, the West has never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.

—Aimé Césaire (2000, p. 42)

INTRODUCTION

This chapter introduces the vision of transformative Black education— understood as a fundamental requirement of human freedom in a civilized world—that shaped the work of the AERA Commission on Research in Black Education (CORIBE). The abysmal state of Black education in the United States and globally is an inhumane situation that calls into question the values and pronouncements of Western “civilization.” The research and educational practice assembled in this volume illustrate two critical elements of this vision. First, the educational and life experiences of African descent people are historically and culturally interconnected. Second, the well-being of humanity is inextricably linked to the material and spiritual welfare of African people. This understanding of Black education in the context of African cultural continuity and larger civilizational issues (Munford, 2001) is missing from the mainstream discourse on education reform in the United States; it is absent in models of “development” for Africa and Latin America, where the African presence is gaining increasing attention, and this perspective is largely lacking in multicultural education approaches as well.

Historically, the economic and social development of Europe and the Americas, even “the very idea of freedom”(Wilder, 2000) and “civilization’’ (Césaire, 2000), have turned on the status of African people (Robinson, 2000). Neither the commonalities among African people, including our educational experiences, or humankind’s dependence on the welfare of African people for their well-being—human freedom to be more precise— are recent phenomena. Human freedom in this new millennium remains inextricably bound up with the life chances, and, therefore, the education of African people “here and there in the world” (Diop, 1981/1991). Thus, the theoretical underpinning of this understanding of Black education, and the possibilities for human freedom that depend upon ending our dispossession, suggests a critical question addressed in this chapter: What has happened to the Black education/ socialization agenda?

BRINGING OUR DISPOSSESSION TO AN END: A CULTURE-SYSTEMIC THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The conception of human freedom advanced in this book is grounded in the culture-systemic theoretical framework Sylvia Wynter developed. A Professor Emerita of Spanish and Portuguese and African and African American Studies at Stanford University, Wynter proposes a very specific role for intellectuals and educators in ending our dispossession. Her “culture-systemic” analysis of the cultural logic of the social order builds on the contributions of Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and theoretician of the anticolonial Algerian revolution from the former French colony of Martinique, and African American historian Carter G. Woodson (1933) who wrote the classic Miseducation of the Negro. Referring to herself as a “Woodsonian,” and drawing on her personal experience of subordination growing up as a former British colonial subject in Jamaica, Wynter’s analysis shows how mainstream education functions in the domination of subordinated groups and works against the interests of human freedom (King, 1997; Wynter, 1968/1969).

In an interview, which recapitulates her entire intellectual biography— spanning her career as a writer, actress, dancer, Black Studies scholar, and literary theorist beginning in the 1950s—Wynter explains that:

. . . intellectuals and artists who belong to a subordinated group are necessarily going to be educated in the scholarly paradigms of the group who dominates you. But these paradigms, whatever, their other emancipatory attributes must have always already legitimated the subordination of your group. . . . Must have even induced us to accept our subordination through the mediation of their imaginary. (Scott, 2000, p. 169)

Clearly, this is one way to understand what hegemony means. If, as Holt (2000) suggests, however, “racism is a form of knowledge,” then Black education and research practice that produce knowledge and understanding of the process(es) of domination and dispossession, which Wynter refers to as a “new science of the human,” also can create possibilities for liberating thought and social action. As Wynter further observes:

In every human order there are always going to be some groups for whom knowledge of the totality is necessary, seeing that it is only with knowledge of the totality that their dispossession can be brought to an end. (p. 188)

In fact, it is human consciousness and identity that are also distorted by these hegemonic structures of knowledge (King, 1992). Therefore, from this perspective of the inherent liberatory potential of Black education, the ultimate object of a transformative research and action agenda is the universal problem of human freedom. That is, a goal of transformative education and research practice in Black education is the production of knowledge and understanding people need to rehumanize the world by dismantling hegemonic structures that impede such knowledge. The Commission’s focus, therefore, producing knowledge and understanding of the universal human interests in the survival and development of African people, represents a fundamental engagement with what Césaire (2000) called “a humanism made to the measure of the world” (p. 42). This is precisely why the work of the Commission is not a narrow, self-interested racialized project that ignores the diversity among people of African descent or “essentializes” matters of race. The Commission’s examination of Black education globally, historically, and systemically underscores that planetary interests of humankind are at stake.

From the perspective of this transformative understanding of Black education and to stimulate improvements in research and policy making, the Commission explored a number of questions: What forms of knowledge, inquiry, and social action should be the goal of transformative research in Black education? How can such a transformative research and action agenda continue the intellectual tradition of visionary Black thought and collective action? Are there models of exemplary research and practice that merit emulation, support, and wider dissemination? Are some aspects of such an agenda beyond the responsibility of AERA and, therefore, should be taken up independently of the Association? What constitutes a more transformative role for AERA with respect to Black education? What opportunities exist or need to be developed in alliance with other groups and organizations such as with policy decision makers, practitioners, scholars in other disciplines, artists, and community constituents, including parents and students? Is there a role for the Internet and cybertechnology in mobilizing paradigm changing research and action in Black education and socialization—here and globally? Finally, two of the most crucial questions that guided the Commission’s inquiries and activities are addressed directly in this chapter and in several of other chapters in this volume:

1. What has happened to the Black education and socialization agenda, here, throughout the Diaspora and in Africa? and
2. How can education research become one of the forms of struggle for Black education?

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE BLACK EDUCATION/SOCIALIZATION AGENDA?

This question was first posed as a challenge to the CORIBE working colloquium participants by one of the CORIBE Elders. The late Baba Kwame Ishangi literally chided us to reflect more deeply on our role as intellectuals and to take more responsibility for addressing the effects of racism, hegemony, as well as the work we do as educators. Baba Ishangi’s challenging question is a reminder that epistemological matters have tangible effects on our souls, on the material and spiritual well-being of our people and humanity in general. In essence, “We have a charge to keep.”

This “charge” emanates from the contradictions that gave rise to the Commission. CORIBE was established amid recurring tensions around the politics of knowledge within AERA. In 1997 the task force convened by the AERA Committee on the Role and Status of Minorities, chaired by Edmund W. Gordon (1997), produced a compelling report that describes these tensions as an “epistemological crisis” within the association. Epistemology can aptly be described as a “power-knowledge-economics regime” (Vinson & Ross, 2001). In other words, epistemological concerns have to do not only with the nature, origin, and boundaries of knowledge, but also with whose knowledge counts (for funding, for instance), and which research paradigms and “ways of knowing” the research establishment validates. This establishment (or regime) includes the legitimating power and prestige of AERA (B. Gordon, 1990).

Functioning like Kuhn’s (1970) “normal science paradigm,” by “blaming the victim,” this establishment research regime has generally not acknowledged the ways that Black education and socialization have been destabilized and undermined through the processes of schooling (King & Lightfoote-Wilson, 1994; Shujaa, 1994), hegemonic processes of teacher education (Meacham, 2000), and research itself. For instance, Lee demonstrates in Chapters 3 and Chapters 4 that much of the research that she and Mich`ele Foster reviewed for the Commission, which regards African/African American cultural practice as an asset to be used in the design of education interventions and pedagogical practice, is marginalized and remains “on the fringe” of education research discourse. Another example of how this “normal science” paradigm functions is the National Research Council (NRC) publication, “Improving Student Learning: A Strategic Plan for Education Research and Utilization.” Introduced to the public with great fanfare at the 1999 AERA annual meeting, this prestigious state-of-theknowledge report shows how establishment research, by conceptualizing Black students as “disadvantaged” and “at risk,” can have the colonizing effect of “othering” these students by placing them outside a normative standard. This is not an inclusive, universal standard; rather, it is culturally specific and ethnocentric: It represents the generic White middle-class norm that Sylvia Wynter refers to as the category of “ethno-class ‘Man’.”Of course, the use of such concepts by the National Institute on the Education of At-Risk Students, sponsored by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), reflects the conceptual framework of the sponsoring agency. Regardless of the race or background of the scholars involved, use of this language and the “deficit” thinking behind it reveal the fundamental problem of epistemological bias and hegemony in research and its application. This is part and parcel of the epistemological crisis within AERA, a kind of paradigm bias that affects:

• How research in Black education is conceptualized
• Whose research agenda gets funded and supported for empirical investigation and replication
• Which research is accepted as “scientific” and validated (that is, legitimated or rejected by prestigious sponsors (like OERI, NSF) and professional associations like AERA
• What kinds of research gets disseminated widely (or not at all) and used (or ignored) in policy decision making, by practitioners as well as parents and the news media and
• Howteachers, administrators, researchers, and professors are trained.

Professional Research Training—A Schizophrenic Bind? These problems of intellectual hegemony exist in graduate school training across the disciplines (King, 1999). For instance, graduate students of color in a doctoral program in sociology describe their experiences with conceptual, methodological, and ideological constraints in a Harvard Education Review article entitled “The Department Is Very Male, Very White, Very Old, and Very Conservative”(Margolis&Romero, 1998). Edmund W. Gordon (1999) acknowledges that “many minority scholars find themselves in the schizophrenic bind of using ethnocentric paradigms that are generally accepted as scientific truisms, but are lacking validation” in the experiences of scholars of color and/or their intuitions (p. 178). Likewise, Africana scholars (people of African descent) on the continent and in the Diaspora also are concerned about this kind of alienation. In his inaugural address to the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, ^* Professor Kwesi Yankah (2000) laments the “complete alienation of scholarly authority” of indigenous (African) intellectuals in favor of the “western academy” and the marginalization of their own academic agenda. Professor Yankah asks an unsettling question: “Who wants to be an alien in a new world academic order?” As Yankah further observes:

. . . in conceding to so-called globalization trends within the academy, we often forget that “globalization” is merely the promotion of another local culture and knowledge to the world stage. The question of whose local knowledge is centralized as the standard and whose should be designated peripheral borders on the politics of knowledge: “Who is in control”? (Yankah, 2004, p. 7)

Historically, many Black intellectuals as well as other scholars of color have experienced their academic and professional preparation as this schizophrenic bind—problems of epistemological bias, hegemony, and scholarly alienation—as an “either–or” choice between the normative paradigm of supposedly objective, detached, and impartial scholarship versus an ethic of community-mindedness, “a charge to keep” in which education and socialization reflect the interests of our communities (Foster, 1998; Garcia, 2001; Meacham, 1998; Tedla, 1997). The quality of knowledge the mainstream research establishment produces is implicated in the historical and continuing domination of African people in the United States, the Diaspora and on the African continent as well as in the “scholarly” justifications of the poverty and other racialized disparities that enslavement and colonial domination introduced. Besides the “achievement gap” that has gained widespread attention recently, a knowledge gap also exists in terms of the preparedness of Africana researchers, educators, and parents to address the root causes of this crisis.

The Crisis of the Black Intellectual. The late Jacob Carruthers (1994) concluded that “the failu...