The African Diaspora's Links to Inquiry on Human Learning and Development: Implications for Post-Pandemic Education

• In Event: Reimagining Equitable Education Through Cross-Cultural Conversation: Toward an Equitable New Normal in the Era of Post-Pandemic

Abstract

We pay insufficient attention to the underlying philosophical assumptions that inform educational systems in different countries. In the U.S., the covid pandemic has shed light on the restrictive practices experienced by minoritized populations and called attention to the need to address more wholistic needs of young people.
This paper examines congruences between philosophical propositions around human functioning drawn from African/African diaspora (Karenga, 2003, 2006) and current foundational propositions from across the learning sciences, human development and the neurosciences (Cantor et al, 2018; Lee, 2008, 2009, 2017a 2017b; Lee, Meltzoff & Kuhl, 2020). They share assertions about the malleability of human cognition, the essentiality of social relationships, and the moral dimensions of human development for individuals and communities. In both U.S. and in other diasporic countries with significant populations of persons of African descent, understanding these sources of congruence is particularly important because of the on-going impact of the legacies of colonialism, enslavement, and restrictive structures on what and how African descent children in these communities learn in formal schooling.
The paper illustrates these congruences in examples from the substance and organization of schooling during the Jim Crow era in the U.S. when African-American education was largely segregated (Hilliard, 1986; Siddle-Walker, 2000). The paper then proposes implications of these foundational principles for the opportunities to re-organize and re-focus K-12 education post-pandemic in ways that prepare young people, particularly minoritized populations, to thrive intellectually, emotionally and physically, taking into account their unique multiple developmental demands – normative life course, personal and ecological challenges resulting from structures of racism (Boykin, 1986; Spencer, 2006; Swanson et al. 2003, 2010). This re-organization requires attention to dialogic relations among thinking and feeling, the salience of perceptions of experience, re-thinking the epistemologies and goals of content area instruction; and most important attention to what is required for stakeholders to re-imagine their underlying assumptions about human learning and development in ways that are most expansive and interrogate the culturally restrictive assumptions that have historically informed how the U.S., in this case, thinks about schooling.

Author

• Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University