The purpose of this study is to examine how members of the community, educators, legislators, and members of the academy organized and mobilized to bring Florida Statute 1003.42(h) into being. This Afrocentric case study policy analysis centers African people, educators, and policymakers as agents, actors, and subjects with agency who determined that such legislation was needed and necessary for the education of African American students and all students. Data, in the form of document analysis, websites in the states of New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and South Carolina with similar laws, and Florida’s Commissioner’s Task Force on African American History, newspaper accounts, and interviews with key people involved in the creation of the Florida legislation, were analyzed using an Africological methodology. Findings include several major themes that emerged about educational curriculum content, intent, needs, and analysis relative to why this legislation was sponsored and passed including: (a) inaccuracy and omission, (b) correction and inclusion, (c) consciousness and competence, (d) policy and priority, (e) power and precedence. The final product includes a theory of Selective Memory Manipulation and a Paradigm for Afrocentric Educational Policy Production and Analysis.

As a culturally relevant alternative to traditional public school environments, Independent African Centered schools feature a particular type of culturally relevant pedagogy. This study explored the teachers’ and administrator’s perceptions and applications of African Centered pedagogy in an African Centered school. Interviews, observations and a document review served as the source of data for this study. This basic interpretive study utilized a qualitative research design to explore the perceptions and application of African Centeredness among the participants. An analysis of the data revealed categories and themes related to the school’s mission and the participants’ perceptions and performance of African-centered pedagogy. Three general conclusions were drawn from the findings. Implications for theory, study limitations and recommendations for future research are provided.

Background: Constructive alignment (CA) is a pedagogical approach that emphasizes the alignment between the intended learning outcomes (ILOs), teaching and learning activities (TLAs) and assessment tasks (ATs) as well as creation of a teaching/learning environment where students will be able to actively create their knowledge. Objectives: This paper aims at investigating the extent of constructively-aligned courses in Computer Engineering and Informatics department at Dalarna University, Sweden. This study is based on empirical observations of teacher’s perceptions of implementation of CA in their courses. Methods: Ten teachers (5 from each department) were asked to fill a paper-based questionnaire, which included a number of questions related to issues of implementing CA in courses. Results: Responses to the items of the questionnaire were mixed. Teachers clearly state the ILOs in their courses and try to align the TLAs and ATs to the ILOs. Computer Engineering teachers do not explicitly communicate the ILOs to the students as compared to Informatics teachers. In addition, Computer Engineering teachers stated that their students are less active in learning activities as compared to Informatics teachers. When asked about their subjective ratings of teaching methods all teachers stated that their current teaching is teacher-centered but they try to shift the focus of activity from them to the students. Conclusions: From teachers’ perspectives, the courses are partially constructively-aligned. Their courses are “aligned”, i.e. ILOs, TLAs and ATs are aligned to each other but they are not “constructive” since, according to them, there was a low student engagement in learning activities, especially in Computer Engineering department. / <p>Högskolepedagogik, högskolepedagogisk utbildning, BHU</p>

The study sought to understand how Grade 9 History teachers perceive and implement learner-centered education (LCE) in selected schools in Caprivi educational region in the Republic of Namibia. It concentrated on three teachers in two combined and junior secondary schools. The research employed a qualitative approach and three data instruments were used: interviews, class observations and document analysis. The findings of the study show that in their interview discussions of the principles, intent and recommended key features of LCE, the three participating teachers generally correctly captured some of the essential intentions of a LCE approach. At times in the interviews they seemed to strongly grasp the essence of a key strategy and its intent, but at other times their views were sketchy. Their view of different teaching strategies at times appeared integrated but not always that strongly. When it came to their classroom practice they could and did use a number of appropriate LCE teaching approaches. The level of effectiveness in their use of many of the approaches varied from effective to far from ideal and in need of quite big improvement. In the area of resources the three classrooms were extremely limited in what they displayed, had and used. There were too few textbooks and almost no posters and wall displays on history and the geography of the world and its peoples that the students were studying. An especially interesting feature was that they all seemed to be consciously engaged in an on-going teaching experiment with the LCE approaches. The LSC [sic] practices were clearly not yet strongly imbedded as solid classroom habits or dispositions, with perhaps the exception of questioning. But this experimenting made them much more self-conscious and reflective about their experiences. They all frankly identified some tensions that they felt existed between the espoused official features of a LCE class and the demands of the covering the curriculum, size of classes etc. Overall it was an encouraging picture of teachers eager to find ways to improve their teaching and experiment with new ideas. But also a picture of people not properly exposed to good or best practice in each teaching strategy and having to reinvent and rediscover on their own even the basics of reasonable practice often making very basic mistakes, for example in questioning.

No description available.

In educational research, a prevalent topic of discussion is African-centered pedagogy. This phenomenological study records the unique perspectives of adults who specifically grew up in African-centered learning environments from a young age. The sample includes 10 African American adults, aged 18-45, from various cities in the United States. Mixed methods are applied in this study: group concept mapping strategies are implemented to yield both qualitative and quantitative results for analysis. Data is further supplemented with one-on-one interviews, and a review of themes from interview transcripts using multiple coding processes. Findings from this particular demographic can add another dimension to the current literature on the relevancy and need for culturally relevant pedagogical practice for African-American children. The ultimate goal of this generative study is to serve as a resource for educators, parents and students – which includes documented practices and methods for further consideration and application.

The purpose of this research was to explore the work of Dr. Asa Grant Hilliard, III (Nana Baffour Amankwatia, II) in three areas: (1) traditional African education and socialization, (2) responsibilities of African teachers, and (3) the need for inter/multicultural teacher education programs. It was also the purpose of this research to explore my African identity development and transformation as I interacted with, studied, and read works by Dr. Hilliard. Data used in the study include a selection of works by Dr. Hilliard, fieldnotes, fieldletters, original poetry and essays, and memory data (St. Pierre, 1997). Qualitative content analysis and autoethnography were combined to present an autoethnographic content analysis (ACA) of Dr. Hilliard’s work. The ACA method is unique to this study and provided a reflexive analysis of documents (Altheide, 1987) complimented by recognition of the events that contributed to my African identification. Findings from the study revealed several major themes in Dr. Hilliard’s work: (a) African socialization to challenge the MAAFA, (b) traditional African education for all children, (c) African teachers as responsible teachers, and (d) teacher education for inter/multicultural perspectives. The final product is an amalgamation of academic and literary writing, and includes poems, vignettes, and autobiographical narratives.

No description available.

The purpose of this study was to explore the emergence of subject-ness among children in the context of a world-centered elementary general music class. I addressed this purpose through the creation and implementation of a curriculum project in which young children engaged in lullaby songwriting. In so doing, I sought to explore curricular and pedagogical alternatives: namely, curricular purposes beyond functional literacy and pedagogical approaches with relational potential. This curriculum project was enacted alongside children (ages 5–6) participating in three classes of kindergarten general music in the elementary school at which I taught at the time. I framed this study using Biesta’s (2021b) domains of educational purpose and, in particular, the notion that teaching has the potential to encourage children to be(come) subjects in their own lives, rather than objects in the lives of others. Furthermore, I relied upon world-centered education (Biesta, 2021b) in this study as a means of addressing a “grown-up” (p. 51) orientation to subject-ness in which the subject is “in the world and with the world, and not just with themselves” (Biesta, 2020b, p. 37, emphasis in original). To realize this framework, I invoked three supporting concepts: project-based teaching (Dillon, 2023a), dialogic pedagogy (White, 2016a, 2021), and compassionate care (Hendricks, 2023). For this study, I assembled a critical educational action research design drawing upon Somekh’s (2006) principles of action research. The progressively iterative nature of this three-phase project was initially influenced by the self-reflective action research spiral (Kemmis et al., 2014), which I later adapted into the action research trellis—a visual framing in which inquiry is illustrated as potentially growing in divergent and unpredictable ways. Data collected as part of this action research study included video observations of our enactment of the curriculum project, focus group interviews with children, an individual interview with a kindergarten teacher, my research journal entries, and various artifacts, such as lesson plans. I conducted a thematic analysis of the data (Glesne, 2016) which yielded three overarching themes: snapshots of emergent subject-ness in childhood focused on care, resistance, and dissent; pointing as an invitation to explore subject-ness, including the myriad ways in which this pointing manifested and facets of the curriculum project which contributed to this pointing; and the reflexive gifts of teaching, including “philosophical play” and teacher-student “connections” (Research Journal Entries). I situated the implications of these findings in terms of both curricular and pedagogical reimaginings.

African American rites of passage (ROP) have historically contributed to adolescent gender socialization enabling Black youth to overcome the effects of racism and oppression. ROP in the schools provide lessons in Black history, traditions, and culture as they guide youth through the turbulent terrain of adolescence via the communal "coming of age" process. This study examined adolescent girls' experiences in weekly ROP classes at Ella Baker Freedom Academy (EBFA) Charter School over the course of one academic year and five months. EBFA is an African-centered Freedom School in a northeastern city in the United States. This study employed ethnographic methods within a Black Feminist/Womanist framework to investigate how rites of passage support adolescent girls' gendered ethnic identity, self-concept, and peer relations. This study fills in gaps in the literature on ROP, focusing on the participants' ROP experiences within the intersections of adolescent identity formation, womanhood and sisterhood empowerment, and culturally relevant gender socialization practices in school. Three major questions guided the study: 1) How ROP classes supported adolescent girls' intersecting and developing gender and ethnic identities; 2) How ROP classes supported students' female peer relations; and 3) How African values were utilized in ROP classes. The study revealed the interconnected ways in which ROP supported participants' developing gender/ethnic identities, and improved peer relationships, conflict resolution strategies, and personal definitions of womanhood. The ROP classes supported students by: a) developing a critical awareness of sexism, internalized oppression; i.e., colorism, negative racial/gendered stereotypes about Black women and girls in U.S. society, particularly those propagated through the media; b) building appreciation, esteem, and respect in themselves and each other; c) cultivating positive academic identities through healthy female peer relationships via critical dialogue, trust building, conflict resolution, and empowering communications; d) developing personal standards for womanhood using African-centered values; and e) revealing gendered passageways to womanhood and sisterhood in intergenerational and emotionally safe spaces, and across school contexts. / Urban Education