Browsing by Subject "Black Education"
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Item African Communitarianism As Black Student Motivation: An Institutional Exploration of Collectivism In African-Centered Education(2020-05) Banwo, BodunrinThe dissertation presented is an examination of two African-centered educational institutions that are serving as a formal agent of student socialization. Moreover, these schools’ ideological foundation of Black Nationalism and Pan Africanism is a response to the harmful practice of socialization in the broader society. These schools, through their incorporation of radical politics, are an effort to understand and address the “inequality regimes” that surround black children in mainstream educational systems. Further, the politics of African centered schools are upfront, talked about, and visible for all to see, which the leaders regard as a process of socialization that orient black children into a process of white supremacy visibilization. Additionally, with this dissertation, I took an ethnographic approach to understand how African centered systems of education, centers race, and racialized histories at their organizational core. Moreover, I am particularly interested in how black students, whom I see as our society’s most vulnerable school-age population, experience a formal organization designed and tailored around their healthy social development. The dissertation also examines what I am calling imagined African cultural artisans and their role of imagining and crafting a black imagined community in their African centered school. I see their culture creation in a form of new cultural production. This cultural production seeks to be inclusive and supportive of all people of African descent. Moreover, this exploration of African cultural artisans is also the idea that members of the African Diaspora are “bound” together in a nationalist relationship brought about by a socially constructed idea of community or brotherhood, imagined by Africans who perceive themselves as a part of a familiar group. The concept is theorized from Benedict Anderson’s (1983) concept, “Imagined Communities,” which depicts a nation as a socially constructed community, imagined by members of a shared social group. I shine a light into educational and political leadership discourse’s lack of examination of the “assumed” and “taken for granted” labor that is expected from racialized and organizationally vulnerable students and families. African-centered leaders and thinkers perceive the landscape of mainstream educational institutions as locations of politics and harm that have historically failed to investigate how the history of Africans in the United States has been undermined and harmed by the capitalist notion of black humanity. These thinkers also see that these harmful notions have not disappeared with the practices of societal growth and multiculturalism. They view harmful organizational practices as being embedded in mainstream schools’ histories and traditions. For them, only a total rethinking of institutions of learning will entirely excise practices and traditions of harm. Many school models attempt this excision, and this dissertation will contribute to those efforts.Item Educational Migrations: A Critical Narrative Study of Educational Movement in a Rural Southeast Michigan Community.(2019-07) Joubert, EzekielThis dissertation is on the formation of educational movement in a rural Southeast Michigan community. I examine black community strategies for engaging in educational processes that involve student movement, to better understand historical struggles for equal education and interrogate the educational structures that reproduce racial capitalist social relations. Drawing from critical educational scholarship, black intellectual thought in education, spatial-economic theories, critical narrative and African American and black studies, I document how twenty black rural residents, ages 21-96, engaged in and imagined school related migrations. I used interviews and locally sourced archival materials to trace the impact of schooling in a racial capitalist society (Robinson, 1983), at the intersections of the rural question, race/racism, social mobility and labor, in a region central to the national imagining of American progress and development. Shaped by the Great Migration and deindustrialization of Metropolitan Detroit, their critical narratives (Goodson & Gill, 2014) demonstrate how school district remapping, choice reforms, vocational training and tracking (ostensible solutions for marginalized communities) contribute to further segregation and structural inequality. I contend that their organizing, collaborations, and art/literary practices provide insights for developing and employing cooperative and collective educational responses to the ways schools participate in social stratification, racial-spatial discrimination, and the uneven redistribution of resources. This research offers pedagogical and curricular implications for transforming and complicating educational discourse and practice that simply associate the movement of predominantly poor and/or black children across neighborhood, district, and county borders with equality and upward mobility.