African Communitarianism As Black Student Motivation: An Institutional Exploration of Collectivism In African-Centered Education
2020-05
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African Communitarianism As Black Student Motivation: An Institutional Exploration of Collectivism In African-Centered Education
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2020-05
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The 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.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2020. Major: Educational Policy and Administration. Advisor: Peter Demerath. 1 computer file (PDF); xiii, 281 pages.
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Banwo, Bodunrin. (2020). African Communitarianism As Black Student Motivation: An Institutional Exploration of Collectivism In African-Centered Education. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/216172.
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