Thinking Back, Thinking Black: Learning Black History, Culture, and Education Through Ghana

• In Event: Black History Past and Present: Theoretical and Practical Considerations for Teaching and Learning Black History

Abstract

This research study examines how the contexts of a Ghana study abroad program in education cultivated a deeper understanding of the connected cultural, historical, and contemporary contributions and engagements of Black peoples for preservice teachers (Collins, 2009; Levine, 2007; Palmer, 2011). The data for this study came from preservice teachers who participated in the program in 2013, part of a larger five year study.

We utilize Black and endarkened feminist epistemologies and theories (Collins, 1990; Dillard, 2006; hooks, 2000) to frame both the study abroad curriculum and as the analytical lenses used to examine student experiences within the program. As critical theories, Black feminisms are useful frameworks for examining a study abroad program that explicitly makes historical and cultural links between African, African American, and diasporic Africans in ways that are historically accurate and culturally relevant to education students and in the education of the students they will teach.

Data for this study arises from course assignments on campus and in Ghana, videotapes of focus group interview and audiotapes of individual interviews, and field notes of group discussions in Ghana. The various types of data were analyzed qualitatively for themes related to the influence of the study abroad program on students’ perspectives and knowledge of Black identity, culture, and their own educational practices (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).

Three major findings emerged from our analysis of data gathered from preservice teachers who participated in the program in 2013:
1. Studying and learning about (and in) Ghana was a transformative experience for each student. However, race and ethnicity of individual students impacted their learnings about Black identity culture and educational practice.
2. Sites of racial and racialized trauma (for example, the slave dungeons in Cape Coast, Ghana) were deeply transformative learning sites for racial and gender healing and the cultural knowledge uncovered in these sites served as models of (re)membering pedagogies.
3. The preservice teachers shifted their professional positionality from persons who “came to teach” to persons who “needed to learn.” This shift reoriented learning and professional development possibilities and potentialities that deeply influenced the participants’ understanding of Black culture, identity, and history and its relationship to their own cultural identities, history, and teaching practice in productive and powerful ways.
The significance of both the development of this study abroad curriculum as well as the role of critical study for preservice teachers is at least partly in our focus on the long legacy of Black education and the relation between the African continent and the African diaspora. Findings from this study suggest that such a teacher preparation must focus on global Black heritage in order to prepare teachers whose perspectives, understandings and knowledges prepare them to be able to respond to the needs of Black children and those marginalized within our society.

Authors

• Cynthia B. Dillard, University of Georgia

• Kristen Duncan, University of Georgia - Athens

• Latoya Johnson, University of North Georgia