Teaching Our Own: A Collective Ethnography of the Establishment of an African-Centered Charter School

• In Event: 31.073 - Recentering Evidence: Examining Black Educational Narratives to Challenge the Idea of a Post-Truth Era

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to describe the establishment of The People’s Charter--an African Centered secondary school for students who live on the southwest side of a southern metropolis. The study considers African Indigenous Knowledges to examine the practices enacted by the group during two meetings. This study is guided by the following questions: What are the practices of a Black collective looking to establish an African-centered school? How are those practices connected to African-centered ways of being/doing? What does it mean for a Black collective to “teach their own” in a “post-truth” era?
Charter school planning researchers use African Indigenous Knowledges (AIK) to consider the influence of current discourses of a post-truth era and what this moment in history means for the education of Black youth. AIK as a theoretical frame invites the researchers (all participant observers) to examine the “return to a sacred place for African people, a place implicated in our complex relationships to the past and present, that has the possibility to both center the spirit and to shift the epistemological and cultural location of our thought and action in the world” (Dillard & Bell, 2011).
Theoretical Framework/ Methodology
The researchers (and participants) use ethnographic case study methods in order to capture discourses around the establishment of The People’s Charter. We refer to this as collective ethnography as the participants of the study are also researchers in their own right. This approach to understanding African-centeredness seeks to honor the spirituality, wisdom, and critical interventions of transnational Black people’s ways of knowing and being in research (Dillard, 2006).
Results/Significance
The paper will utilize field notes, interview data, and documents, to describe the ideas, practices, and languages that (re)shaped the founding of The People’s Charter. According to DeWalt and DeWalt (2002), participant observation should accompany other forms of qualitative methodology to be most beneficial. In this collective ethnography, observations are necessary as a means of triangulating the data from any documents and interviews. Collected field notes at relevant venues where work is conducted in regard to the school are essential data sources. As participant observers, the meetings and planning sessions will constitute the “field” where we conduct data collections. We will collect notes that chronicle events as well as review any video recording and formal aspects of interview and informal cross talk. Preliminary analysis of the data reveal that the collective who worked to establish an African-centered charter school engaged African Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies, ontologies, cosmologies, in order to discuss their visions for curriculum, discipline, and other aspects of being educator/educated at The People’s Charter. Through AIK, we access our collective (re)memory to examine teacher and teacher leader praxis as an extension of Black American uplift pedagogy and as a set of practices deeply rooted in African diasporic and indigenous cultural ethos, wherein members of school communities are imagined as fully self-determining agents in their own liberation.

Authors

• Khalilah Odessa Ali, Spelman College

• Denise Johnson, Imhotep Academy

• Latrise Johnson, The University of Alabama