Description: Connecting cultures to educational settings is an essential component of critical pedagogy. This book addresses many of the key issues and challenges in decolonizing the African school curriculum. It highlights important philosophical arguments on the challenges and possibilities of achieving these goals in a meaningful manner. Topics covered in the book include:
- operationalizing the key terms of "inclusion" and "curriculum"
- strategies for Africanizing the school curriculum, and
- the implications of local knowledge for schooling reform
- how do we frame an inclusive anti-colonial African future and what is the nature of the work required to collectively arrive at that future?
- what education are learners of today going to receive and how will they apply it to their schooling and work lives?
- how do we re-fashion our work as African educators and learners to create more relevant understandings of what it means to be human?
- how do we challenge colonizing and imperializing relations of the academy? What are the possibilities and limits of counter-visions of education?
- how do we make school curricula inclusive through teaching, research and graduate training in questions of Indigeneity and multi-centric ways of knowing?
Brief description: Ghanaian-born George Sefa Dei is a renowned educator, researcher and writer who is considered by many as one of Canada's foremost scholars on race, anti-racism studies, Black and minority education, African Indigeneity and anti-colonial thought. Professor Dei has forty-seven (47) books, over eighty (80) refereed journal articles, as well as 78 chapters in books to his credit. Finally, in June of 2007, Professor Dei was installed as a traditional chief in Ghana, specifically, as the Gyaasehene of the town of Asokore, Koforidua in the New Juaben Traditional Area of Ghana. His stool name is Nana Adusei Sefa Tweneboah.
Review Quotes: "A profound, insightful and scholarly discourse on transforming and decolonizing colonial school contexts and curriculum that have continued to neglect the lived experiences, voices, histories and cultures of African educators and learners. Afful-Broni, Anamuah-Mensah, Raheem, and Dei have carefully compiled a volume that addresses and acknowledges that African voices and cultures matter in educational contexts. Their collection will be of interest to stakeholders interested in transforming and Africanizing school curriculum and school contexts."--Edward Shizha, Professor in Youth and Children's Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford