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: "The time has come for leaders, educators, practitioners and policy makers to acknowledge and address the oppressive actions, attitudes and policies that continue to infiltrate education systems. Africanizing the School Curriculum offers insights into decolonizing education as a form of critical praxis, moving from theory to action. With strategies and solutions to achieving equitable and accessible education for all, this book would be beneficial for any teacher, equity liaison, school leader or researcher who believes in the transformative power of education, and in the fundamental right of all students to access, participate and benefit from all aspects of the educational experience." (Full review available at Education Review.)--Reviewed by Shezadi Khushal, University of Toronto, Canada