George J. Sefa Dei

Learning Culture, Spirituality and Local Knowledge: Implications for African Schooling

Abstract(Learning, Culture, Spirituality and Local Knowedge: Implications for African Schooling) – Using a Ghanaian case study, this paper looks at the relevance and implications of local knowledge, culture and spirituality for understanding and implementing educational change in Africa. It examines how teachers, educators, and students use local cultural knowledge about self, personhood and community. Among the critical issues raised are: How do subjects understand the nature, impact and implications of spirituality for schooling and education? What is the role of spirituality, culture, language and social politics in knowledge production? What contribution does the local cultural knowledge base make to the search for genuine educational options in Africa?(Learning, Culture, Spirituality and Local Knowedge: Implications for African Schooling) – Using a Ghanaian case study, this paper looks at the relevance and implications of local knowledge, culture and spirituality for understanding and implementing educational change in Africa. It examines how teachers, educators, and students use local cultural knowledge about self, personhood and community. Among the critical issues raised are: How do subjects understand the nature, impact and implications of spirituality for schooling and education? What is the role of spirituality, culture, language and social politics in knowledge production? What contribution does the local cultural knowledge base make to the search for genuine educational options in Africa?

Schooling as Community Race, Schooling, and the Education of African Youth

Punctuated with terms such as at risk, dropout, and disadvantaged, Western educational discourse is replete with euphemisms for the reasons that Black youth underachieve or fail in school. This article highlights some of the contemporary developments in Ontario, Canada, focusing on issues of African Canadian education. Pertinent issues of sociological and historical relevance are discussed, with implications for education in the contemporary schooling context. Education must cultivate a sense of identity within culture and community, while working with ancestral cultural knowledge retentions. This calls for a revisioning of the educational system in public schools so as to (a) introduce a more effective method of teaching diverse youth, (b) create spaces where the needs of the most disadvantaged are seriously and concretely addressed (and not glossed over), (c) promote schools with strong ties to the community, and (d) help learners build their self-, collective, and cultural identities within an environment of social excellence.Punctuated with terms such as at risk, dropout, and disadvantaged, Western educational discourse is replete with euphemisms for the reasons that Black youth underachieve or fail in school. This article highlights some of the contemporary developments in Ontario, Canada, focusing on issues of African Canadian education. Pertinent issues of sociological and historical relevance are discussed, with implications for education in the contemporary schooling context. Education must cultivate a sense of identity within culture and community, while working with ancestral cultural knowledge retentions. This calls for a revisioning of the educational system in public schools so as to (a) introduce a more effective method of teaching diverse youth, (b) create spaces where the needs of the most disadvantaged are seriously and concretely addressed (and not glossed over), (c) promote schools with strong ties to the community, and (d) help learners build their self-, collective, and cultural identities within an environm...

The Challenge of Inclusive Schooling in Africa: A Ghanaian Case Study.

This paper explores how African learners and educators work with difference and diversity in schooling populations. Using a Ghanaian case study the paper offers lessons on/about how local discourses relating to ‘inclusivity and nation building’, ‘minority’ and ‘difference’ can inform debates about educational change and guide broad policy initiatives in pluralistic settings. While difference is affirmed, in some circles it can be said Ghanaian educators have not necessarily been responsive. It is contended that Ghanaian, and for that matter, African education, since historical times, has been approached in terms of its fundamental contribution to national development. In emphasizing the goal of post‐independence national integration, ‘postcolonial’ education in Africa has denied heterogeneity in local populations as if difference itself was a problem. With this orientation education has undoubtedly helped create and maintain the glaring disparities and inequities; structured along lines of ethnicity, cult...This paper explores how African learners and educators work with difference and diversity in schooling populations. Using a Ghanaian case study the paper offers lessons on/about how local discourses relating to ‘inclusivity and nation building’, ‘minority’ and ‘difference’ can inform debates about educational change and guide broad policy initiatives in pluralistic settings. While difference is affirmed, in some circles it can be said Ghanaian educators have not necessarily been responsive. It is contended that Ghanaian, and for that matter, African education, since historical times, has been approached in terms of its fundamental contribution to national development. In emphasizing the goal of post‐independence national integration, ‘postcolonial’ education in Africa has denied heterogeneity in local populations as if difference itself was a problem. With this orientation education has undoubtedly helped create and maintain the glaring disparities and inequities; structured along lines of ethnicity, culture, language, religion, gender and class, which persist and grow. By pointing to how local subjects (educators, learners and policy‐makers) link identity, schooling and knowledge production this paper implicates the search for genuine educational options or alternatives for Africa.

The Denial of Difference: refraining anti‐racist praxis

Abstract This article makes a case for the ‘strategic essentialism’ of anti‐racist practice. It reconceptualises anti‐racism by examining the intersections of race and social difference. The article begins with an interrogation of the processes and/or strategies of denying of race in academic discourses and public social practices, and the resistant politics that affirm race and difference. It discusses how in the context of racialised experience(s) (e.g. denial of race and racial difference), anti‐racist knowledge is/can be located. In making race visible the article also points to ensuing theoretical contradictions. A particular focus is on the interface of ‘science’ and the production of race knowledge. Lastly, how to understand social oppressions more broadly while still keeping race at the centre of anti‐racism politics is a key question in reframing integrative anti‐racist practice.

A Forest Beyond the Trees: Tree Cutting in Rural Ghana

In this paper I examine the complexity of human forces involved in tree cutting in a Ghanaian forest region. I provide evidence to link the indiscriminate tree-cutting activities of some local communities to the gradual loss of communal control over land and the replacement of kin group control with state property regimes. I point to the interrelated factors of the states promotion of an exportled development strategy, the intensification of agricultural commercialization, and household and group variations in access to land as all having deleterious impacts on local traditions of sustainable forestry.

Schooling and difference in Africa : democratic challenges in a contemporary context

Preface Acknowledgments * Threads of Inclusive Schooling * Understanding Difference: Method and Practice * Acknowledging Difference, Responding to Diversity * Majority and Minority Relations: A Question of Power * Complicating Schooling: The Question of Ethnicity * Gendered Subjects: Extending Beyond a Critique of Culture * The Economics of Schooling: Class and Poverty * Resisting Normalcy: Disability and Inclusive Schooling * Language as a Site of Exclusion * Evoking the Sacred: Religion and Spirituality in Schools * Concluding with a Comparative Lens: Lessons and Possibilities References Index

‘Becoming Black’: African‐Canadian youth and the politics of negotiating racial and racialised identities

Abstract To move beyond the ‘intellectualisation of transformative social practice’, we as researchers, community activists, etc. need to conduct thorough examinations of discursive practices, employ self‐reflective analyses, and gain an understanding of the power differentials among stakeholders within the Euro‐American/Canadian context. One method of analysis employs ‘black perspectivism’, which means understanding the school system from the multiple interpretations of black/African youths. Black youth are given a racial identity and stereotypes, of ‘being black’, but reject simple constructions and instead take on a politically engendered identification of ‘becoming black’, which is a process of negotiating the social locations of race, gender, sexuality, class and ability to make sense of domination and subordination in Canadian society. In a 3‐year study of over 150 African‐Canadian students and ‘drop‐outs’, their parents, teachers and community workers, we found that students felt pressure to leave ...

What is to be done? a look at some causes and consequences of the African brain drain

Defined primarily in terms of the exodus of the highly talented from the Southern countries to the North, the phenomenon known as “brain drain” has gained in importance during recent decades and years. Changing global conditions, unprecedented developments in information and electronic technology, globalization, and widening of the gap between the South and the North have focused attention on the brain drain. We begin this article by discussing the nature of the brain drain, briefly noting that it occurs in three settings: internal, regional, and global. Our argument here is that brain drain occurs in almost all societies, initially from poorer and impoverished rural areas to relatively rich and developing urban centers within national boundaries and later (or sometimes concurrently) to more developed and wealthy regions and neighboring countries.

Interrogating "African Development" and the Diasporan Reality

The &dquo;development&dquo; obituary has been written if not already read (see also Sachs, 1992). The valorization of international development is today justifiably replaced with the pillorization of socalled development. In fact, it does not require any great sense of intellectual imagination to accede that international development as we’ have all come to know and understand has met with disappointment in Africa. Today, the euphoria of international development has worn thin in the minds of many local peoples. This is, in part, because so-called development has come at a high human, ecological, political, and ethical cost to Africans. The development agenda has literally put to shame the assumption of innocence. Development, with an emphasis on materialization/materialism, has been uneven, uncertain, and inequitable. Any economic gains have been spurious at best and disproportionately channeled to the already wealthy segments of society. What has been institutionalized

Contemporary Issues in African Sciences and Science Education

In this careful articulation of science, the editors provide an intellectual marriage of Indigenous science and science education in the African context as a way of revising schooling and education. They define science broadly to include both the science of the natural/physical/ biological and the ‘science of the social’. It is noted that the current policy direction of African education continues to be a subject of intense intellectual discussion. Science education is very much at the heart of much current debates about reforming African schooling. Among the ways to counter-vision contemporary African education this book points to how we promote Indigenous science education to improve upon African science and technology development in general. The book also notes a long-standing push to re-examine local cultural resource knowings in order to appreciate and understand the nature, content and context of Indigenous knowledge science as a starting foundation for promoting African science and technology studies in general. It is argued that these interests and concerns are not mutually exclusive of each other but as a matter of fact interwoven and interdependent. The breadth of coverage of the collection reflect papers in science, Indigeneity, identity and knowledge production and the possibilities of creating a truly African-centred education. It is argued that such extensive coverage will engage and excite readers on the path of what has been termed ‘African educational recovery’. While the book is careful in avoiding stale debates about the ‘Eurocentricity of Western scientific knowledge’ and the positing of ‘Eurocentric science’ as the only science worthy of engagement, it nonetheless caution against constructing a binary between Indigenous/local science and knowledges and Western ‘scientific’ knowledge. After all, Western scientific knowledge is itself a form of local knowledge, born out of a particular social and historical context. Engaging science in a more global context will bring to the fore critical questions of how we create spaces for the study of Indigenous science knowledge in our schools. How is Indigenous science to be read, understood and theorized? And, how do educators gather/collect and interpret Indigenous science knowledges for the purposes of teaching young learners. These are critical questions for contemporary African education?