Culturally Relevant Teaching and Our Contemplations

Thankfully I’ve finally figured out how to post on here.  I’ve been trying to figure it out since Friday.  But this is what was recorded about  our class on Thursday, October 21st:

Today’s class was quite interesting. We started off with a wonderful guest speaker (whose name escapes me) who spoke with us about Penn’s Leonore Annenberg Teaching Fellowship Program (LATF).  She spoke of the perks of this program for teachers, and the support system that you would have, although you would not be able to leave Philadelphia (which can be a good or bad thing).  She also compared this to the Teach For America program, and gave us the differences, which were quite interesting.  Personally, I would probably choose Teach For America over LATF because it is a national program and the field of connections would be so much larger than just in the Philadelphia region.  Also, I would love to travel so that is an added bonus.  We also talked about different resources we could use, including CURF, Makuu, and the Netter Center.

Next we discussed the expectations and essays for the first session of Ase.  It was interesting to hear everyone’s different perspectives and how they came together and agreed with each other.  We started some interesting conversation from this discussion of Ase.  One of us had expectations that there would be some sense of chaos because we are working with youth.  There was also expectations that there would be growth in mentees.  There was expectations from new Ase participants that the students would be unruly and act as stereotypical urban minority students.  This was a personal expectation for me, because I usually expect the worse so that I can be pleasantly surprised.  Also, I have had to deal with types of students like that before so I was mentally preparing myself.  I hate to stereotype people to a certain extent, but this is what the assignment called for.  I knew that the students would be individually unique but I had to make some generalizations.

Afterwards we talked about the actual first session, and if our expectations were true or not.  Overall the day went extremely well and we were incredibly satisfied with the first session.  It was established that of course growth would not happen overnight in some of the mentees, and we applauded the new sense of structure.  It was nice that the expectations were laid out specifically first thing in the morning.  It was a good reminder for the old students and a good introduction for the new ones.  We agreed that the day flowed pretty well, and there was a lot of maturity in some of the older students as they stepped up and took leadership roles as mentors for the younger ones.  That was a pleasing and inspiring sight.

We then briefly went over our weekly readings.  We talked about Peter Murrell’s excerpts in “The Community Teacher” and his framework for effective urban teaching.  This lead to a discussion that went with our projects that we have to complete.  The critical question “do you have to have a modern model for teaching/education?  Why can’t you use the same example from a eater of 40 years ago?” came up in our discussion.  My argument to that is that it is a part of culturally relevant pedagogy.  Good teachers must make the material relevant, and how can a student now relate to a student back then, other than the fact that they’re both students?  There are so many other issues that students today see that those 40 years ago didn’t have to face, such as social network sites like Facebook and Twitter, plus the booming age of technology and all that has to offer (including in distractions).  It was an interesting discussion to see where everyone was coming from.

We were given the outline for our lesson plan project, and discussed what a lesson plan would entail:

-Idea/theme

-Objective (what)/purpose (why)

-Schedule/time table

-Description of Activities (materials, time, etc)

-Assessment

-What was learned

-The teacher’s performance

-What makes it culturally relevant? (YPAR, Critical Ped)

-(For future instances) Replicability (can you hand this to somebody else to teach it?)

We should also analyze what was hard in this process, and make it easy and fun.  I have found myself enjoying this project as I work through it.  I could see the students relating to some of the topics that I’ve tried to work out, and it will be interesting to see what everyone else comes up with.

 

Another Band-Aid

I know that it may seem harsh to critique programs that try to do well by someone’s child/school/community, but there’s something bothering me today. It goes beyond the embedded patriarchy of “mentoring underprivileged children” and even past the ultimate conclusion of “we (mentors) got more from this than the young people” (by truly experiencing a sliver of their unfathomable educational realities, then going back to the regularity of your life).

What’s bothering me today is that we keep looking for the easy way out. Mentoring is valuable, no doubt. But it’s also very simple to organize (and just as simple to organize poorly so that it can also very easily fall apart, while being completely ineffective during the time that it was supposedly in place… kind of like a Book Club). What’s more, how many mentoring programs does one school need? How many decentralized, underthought and understaffed service programs does it take to make a real difference?

One of the key themes that I will explore as I resume reading and writing more about culturally relevant education, reform, and the future of our communities is SYSTEMS. There isn’t one “issue” causing schools to fail our children. It’s a system of causes, further exasperated by the symptoms and outcomes produced. To address the system of despair, we need a more powerful system of solutions, not another convenient idea that someone dreamed up during their lunch break. Don’t not get involved. But do your research. Let’s figure out where your ideas, energy, and talents may better fit into a more comprehensive, life-changing set of solutions so that everyone gets maximum value out of the effort, and we create the change that is very possible.

Brian Peterson

Sept 30th YPAR

In the beginning of the class we talked about the movie Waiting for Superman, in which 5 families, 3 from NY and 2 from California, of diverse backgrounds (I think 1 daughter was Mexican, 2 African American families, 1 male and 2 female, and 1 Caucasian student) were tracked along their journey of competing for selective schools. The choices were public schools, catholic or private schools. Although private or catholic schools may provide a better education, paying for school would be difficult for single parent households. In some cases, choosing a magnet school/public school education where students are placed on tracks leaves students susceptible to missing out on an opportunity to move up the educational ladder if they weren’t placed on the best track.
We then talked about Youth Participatory Action Research. It deals with the pedagogy of culturally relevant education, but with focus on improving quality of life and socioeconomic standards. When a student can know his or her history, how and why they have become who they are, and understand areas of strength and areas that need improvement, they can become stronger students. A problem highlighted with students trying to overcome the distractions of the community around them was the consequential “brain drain” from communities. Students may develop a depressed outlook to the community around them, and feel overwhelmed by major changes that they want to see happen. Eventually many students decide not to return to or invest in their communities. It is important to provide students with opportunities to make systematic small changes, rather than overburden them with grand problems.
We also touched upon the necessity for students to work with teachers and other students, as opposed to having teachers lecture to a disengaged student body. Facilitation of conversations where students can be involved will allow students to retain information much easier. Allowing students to question teachers, and disagree with teachers can also help students remain engaged in the classroom.
After the class, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. in conjunction with Community Schools Student Partnerships (CSSP) held a discussion about education that I found very informative. What I especially found interesting were two topics that we talked about in class: tenure issues and tracking issues. A teacher may acquire tenure after just two years of teaching in Philadelphia. However, if the teacher is not performing well, it is very difficult to remove them from the system. A panelist who was a principal said that it would take her at least a year and a half to get rid of one teacher, but it would be near impossible to devote that much time to several teachers at once. Furthermore, the teachers that aren’t performing would end up at the schools that need the most dramatic performance improvements to be on par with school standards. This is part of the reason why tracking can be such a problem in the public school system because so many students lose a chance to get ahead with a weak teaching staff. As we talked about in class, it seemed like the honor students who performed well in elementary schools, were the same honor students to fill those positions through junior high and high school. These students will most likely have the most access to innovative professors and teaching methods, lab equipment, advanced placement curriculum and the best college advising. However, if a student were not to perform well academically, it would be difficult to regain the advantaged position of being an honor student. A student may fall into a track where underperformance and minimal support is standard in a school, and their efforts to excel may not receive support. There is somewhat of a tracking system throughout the whole school system and not just within single schools. Non-magnet or top performing schools will receive teachers that other schools would not want. These schools will have their budgets cut, and extra-curricular sports and music programs will go first, with after school programs and curriculum beyond grade level soon to follow.
On a separate but related note, an article that a friend shared with me discussed whether a breakdown of where tax payers’ dollars are sent, would provide encouragement for tax payers to support more progressive programs. <http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=10&year=2010&base_name=cool_idea_friday>

Planting Seeds

As I prepare to release my college success guide, Higher Learning, and continue developing online resources to support it (for students, college access and support counselors, teachers, parents, etc., available at learnhigher.com), I’ve been reflecting back a lot on the lessons that I’ve learned over the years, and the work that I’ve been a part of, helping to get young people ready for college. Even as I revisit the words and chapters within Higher Learning, I’m envisioning how much of a difference I believe this book will make, but also realizing that sometimes the effect may not be as immediate as I would imagine. Just because I’m writing about waking up earlier and studying before class, or not signing up for every single activity on campus, or not waiting until Wednesday evening to start a 4-page paper that’s due Thursday morning, this doesn’t mean that students will immediately adjust their routines. Further, in college access work, it may take a while for students to fully understand and apply all of the subtle things — particularly if the college access work is truly the only time that they are being directly and indirectly exposed to the elements of a college-going culture. It’s easy to get our hopes down if all of our students don’t end up on the Dean’s list or aren’t making instantaneous leaps in their writing. We can’t fall into that trap, however. Our work is about cultivation; when you’re planting seeds, a lot of things will happen underground, unseen, before the sprout will grow. Ase.

Brian Peterson

Making Good Teachers

Saw this clip on CNN’s site. Worth watching. A few observations:

1. Again, light shines on the charter movement. Which leads to…
2. We can’t underestimate the importance of school leadership and school culture. A dynamic teacher in a traditionally underperforming school will have an extremely difficult time in their individual classroom space if the school is not creating a climate of change and excellence. This is what is being demonstrated, to a noticeable degree, in high-performing charter schools.
3. Video is key. I had started an article a while ago that I need to finish, talking about the ways that teaching can be viewed as a “sport.” Coaches spend hours watching film of their team and the competition’s, but many teachers never watch film of an excellent classroom session or critique their own filmed teaching performances. Doug Lemov has, to date, over 600 hours of teaching film. He seems to be learning something from it.

Perhaps most compelling about this piece is that it is another story of success, but it is still a surprise in America. You can hear it clearly in the commentary. Brown children who can learn… who also come from poverty, by and large. This is because their parents were told that they couldn’t learn, so they had to make due out of pieces of dreams, broken systems, and a culture of low achievement. When I see stories like this it’s a genuine reminder of how much easier success is when it doesn’t have to cut against the grain of failure.

Brian Peterson

“I didn’t know hip hop was in Africa” and other musings on African-Centered Pedagogy

The quote in this post’s title comes directly from a student in the 11th grade Humanities and Social Sciences major seminar. Our lesson, which engaged a range of topics–globalization, economic imperialism, diaspora–centered on two readings. One, an ESPN.com article from February 2008, discussed the NBA-sponsored Sports For Education and Economic Development Foundation (SEEDS)–which established numerous youth basketball camps in Senegal–and its utility as a “ticket to an education, a better life and a chance to become a positive force for change back in Senegal. The second reading, an excerpt from NYU anthropologist Michael Ralph‘s dissertation, (At) Play in the Postcolony, conversely took up SEEDS as a reflection of American imperialism, contextualizing basketball’s rising popularity in Senegal in America’s dominance of the global economy, and the diasporic appropriation of African American culture by Senegalese youth.

What does these readigns offer to a discussion of culturally-relevant and African-centered pedagogy? Despite assertions from “multiculturalists” and anti-essentialist critics of the aforementioned approaches, what the readings, and the student’s subsequent response, display is an understanding of race beyond limiting notions of a singular “black” culture. Instead, as evidenced in the case of SEEDS, “blackness,” as a diasporic entity, can only be understood as a process of “translation” (see Brent Hayes Edwards The Practice of Diaspora)–of language, nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc.

In this fashion, I wonder how African-centered pedagogy might be deployed in a distinctly “multiculturalist” project (echoing Molefi Asante’s seminal essay “The Afrocentric Idea in Education.” As opposed to contemporary multicultural approaches that problematically cast “cultures” as passive objects, the approach I suggest here engages culture as an active process, evidenced through the global circulation of “black” culture. As historian James Clifford of Writing Culture-fame notes, “‘Cultures’ do not hold still for their portraits.”

Thus, the cypher from this fall’s BET Hip Hop Awards in the video above similarly offers an implicit theorization of diaspora, effectively dislocating “culture” as a static entity. Observing a Caribbean American (KRS-One), Eritrean American (Nippsey Hussle), Nigerian American (Wale), and Tanzanian (Gsan) artist convene through the hybrid Caribbean and African American musical genre of hip hop, speaks to the function of “culture” in the global diasporic sphere. This understanding of blackness clearly eschews racial essentialism, but is not afraid to engage blackness as a simultaneous articulation of “similarity and difference” (Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”). Thus, how can we utilize African-Centered pedagogy as a medium to attend to “culture” in this fashion? Clearly, the teachable moment demanded by “I didn’t know hip hop was in Africa” speaks to this possibility.

Ryan Jobson

It would look like that afternoon.

I begin with Peter Murrell, a most striking quote from “Culture, Cognition, and the Community of Achievement”:

The life force of pedagogy is not determined by policy or principles, but by practices. It matters not that the faculty of an under-performing urban school decides to be “multicultural” or “antiracist” as a matter of principle or policy. It matters what the practices are (43).

While I am often skeptical of pedagogical theorists, the above quote is the truth. It is not enough to shape your educational vision with ideology — as many of us, our primary and secondary school lives measured not only by inadequate resources, but also gaps in our history textbooks, are inclined to do. In other words, simply dropping concepts like ‘hegemony’ and ‘intersectionality’ will not shape your students into active citizens; the linguistic arsenal is not the end-all. When an educator (or, in my case, facilitator) encourages literacy – not only the ability to engage with texts in all forms, but also the desire to continue one’s engagement indefinitely — that is perfection.

That said, my ideal and idyllic school would look like 10/31/2009, 1:15-2:15 PM:

The theme of the 10/31 meeting of the 11th grade Humanities and Social Sciences seminar was “African American Literature and Criticism.” We examined — through close readings of Alice Walker’s short story “Really, Doesn’t Crime Pay?” (1973) and a performance by Staceyann Chin, Jamaican spoken word poet — histories of feminism and womanism. “Really, Doesn’t Crime Pay?” is one of several short stories in Alice Walker’s anthology, In Love and Trouble, and captures the experience of a (unnamed) black woman driven to violence both by the stifling gender roles in her marriage and by the appropriation of her writing by a fleeting lover. Not only did the class distinguish between feminism and the alternative feminism deployed by women of color, womanism, reflect on the gender roles and limiting stereotypes applied to black women, but they also explored the objectification of black women in the media as well as in their localized contexts (all-boys as well as co-ed high schools, where perhaps teenage misogyny cannot be as pervasive but, according to one young man, one “can still whisper”).

I wish even one of my 2,340 days in public school looked like that.

Given my background–as a black-identified, Afro- and Indo-Caribbean descended female–I tend to reject the rigid boundaries of Afrocentric pedagogy. Murrell, my dude, largely rejects multicultural pedagogy: And, while his observations of multicultural pedagogy in practice do resign curricula to brief highlights of ‘culture’–often displaying it as exotic and static, as in a photograph–a pluralistic approach to African-centered education offers students breadth and depth. That is, noting the West African influences to Afro-Latino cultural practices, or the “intimacies of four continents” (Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas) in the Caribbean, incorporates not only comparative histories of colonialism and systemic inequities, but also the small-scale, day-to-day, interactions with other peoples of color. I now recognize that African-centered pedagogy leaves room for such culturally comparative and inclusive curricula, to include Diasporic diversity, feminisms, etc.

And, it was with such hopes — hopes of pedagogical perfection — that I fashioned the Humanities curriculum of this year’s Humanities and Social Sciences seminar.

- kaneesha cherelle parsard

Some Thoughts on a Perfect School

When B posed the question “what would a perfect school look like” in class, I was initially stumped. Actually, I, to some degree, still am. A flurry of thoughts and ideas rushed through my head all at once. The intersection where theory and practice meet is a busy one, and even when treading carefully, there are many obstacles that one has to be prepared to face. Beyond structural issues like funding and institutional support, one has to take into account various other hurdles like not only getting qualified teachers and motivating dedicated parents, but also getting them on the same page. In no way do I believe that I have solved the problem of schooling or do I think that I have an actual perfect school constructed in my head, but I do have some ideas and suggestions that I would like to put forth for review and discussion.

A Business Framework

Being a student at the school that houses the epicenter of all things business related and dastardly, I am aware of the dangers and the connotations with the word “business”. However, I think there are a few principles that can be taken away from the business world. Personally, I believe that teachers should make much more money, while simultaneously being held accountable for their students; much in the way companies are held accountable for the success of their clients. Living in a capitalist society that I dread, money is nonetheless important. While it drives crime and negative behavior, it is also a motivational drive for those professionals who have mastered their craft. With a general level of increased pay for the profession, teaching can become a much more desired field, while even greater pay can serve as incentive for good teachers to become great. This greater level of societal recognition and fiscal compensation for a career so crucial to the development of our country’s young seems like more than an understandable approach to education. For schools as a whole, a business approach is also relevant. Schools that do not work should not exist. If a company does not make money, then it is no longer a company; it is closed. The same should happen with schools. If a school does not teach, it needs to be closed, revamped and then re-opened. Schools continually failing the students that attend them are doing an injustice to the students, the families, and the communities they are to serve.

Teachers (& a Culturally Relevant Curriculum)

In my opinion, the place to start in the process for a perfect school would be with teaching. At the core of a perfect school, one will find superb teachers. These teachers will not be the run-of-the-mill teachers who expect a few kids to do well, some to do average, and the majority to do poorly. These will be the teachers who are fully present and fully available to the students and to their families. As outlined by Gloria Ladson-Billings, these teachers with culturally relevant practices will: (1) have high self-esteem and a high regard for others, (2) see themselves as part of the community, (3) see teaching as giving back to the community and encourage their students to do the same, (4) see teaching as an art and themselves as artists, (5) believe that all students can succeed, (6) help students make connections between their community, national, and global identities, and (7) see teaching as “Digging Knowledge Out” of students. These tenets illuminate the teachers respect for the child, the child’s community, and the child’s culture.

Parents

Going along with the business framework, I think that actively engaging parents in the learning process is crucial. In a perfect school, I believe that there are open lines of communication between parents, teachers, and administrators. Furthermore, a contract of sorts seems to be a legitimate way in which to keep to parents engaged and to have a tangible way of making all parties involved aware of their roles. As in any investment, time and care are essential parts of success. In no way does one just choose a business plan and just expect it to work without monitoring it and making adjustments. The same goes for students. If education is truly an investment, parents and teachers need to work in harmony to ensure students’ success. It is essential for parents to regard schools as places where learning is enhanced and furthered, but it is even more important for them to realize that all learning starts in the home, and that schooling at it’s best is a collaborative effort.

Students

Thinking wishfully, if the parents and teachers are clear on their ends of the deal, the growth of the students will essentially just fall into place. With teachers engaged and parents engaged, there are few outlets through which the student cannot succeed. Students will be socialized into a world where they are positively surrounded by educational growth in the class and in the home. Things that are relevant to their pursuits and their experiences will characterize their education and practically force them to be interested and active. What I guess I’m trying to get at is, in a perfect school, it becomes nearly impossible for the students to not learn. The aforementioned consistency amongst the parents and teachers translates into consistency among students.

Change

Lastly, in a perfect school, the success of the school should always be in review. These schools are always looking at what they are doing, continuing to do what works, and continuing to improve upon what doesn’t. In this way, failure and subpar quality are not tolerated. Failing schools are in fact not schools and have no place in any community.

 

-CollinDevon

Fieldnotes, Part 1

10/24/2009

The Wire - S4E3 - "Home Rooms"

http://www.megavideo.com/?v=EINA9FOK – Clip starts ~49:30 mark.

Today marked the first meeting of the 11th grade major seminars, and thus our first collective attempt to link theory to practice. Prior to the first class meeting, we prepared a complete course syllabus and bulkpack for the fall semester, providing a survey of the required readings and assignments for the semester.

On Saturday, our Humanities and Social Sciences seminar assembled for the first time in a Huntsman Hall study room, providing an intimate setting for discussion and collaboration. In contrast to my participation in Ase in past years, which was centered in Du Bois College House, the cosmopolitan, “elite” backdrop of Huntsman Hall forced me to reflect on the continued development of Ase. As a community-partnership program affiliated with an Ivy League University, I believe Ase is yet to exploit the resources we are privy to as Penn students, almuni, and staff.

The use of Huntsman Hall, though, signals a shift in Ase’s approach, which demands we continue to consider innovative ways to utilize Penn as an institutional resource. Calling to mind educational theorists such as John Dewey and Ivan Illich, I wonder if Ase can function as a “laboratory” for democratic education in its innovative approach to urban university-community partnerships.

Still, facilitating an Ase seminar in Huntsman Hall also questions the organizational character of Ase moving forward. On a number of occasions during the 45-minute session, either myself, Kaneesha, or one of the students commented on how we should be conscientious of our actions around the “white folk” in Huntsman. Largely, this stemmed from our fear that young, black, high school and college students are in perpetual danger of being removed from the racially-coded, “white” space of Huntsman Hall. In effect, Huntsman brings our marginalization–as black Penn students, high school-aged students, and West Philadelphians–to the forefront. How this affects the dynamic of our seminar and discussions will remain a point to consider as the semester progresses.

In other words, what does it mean for Ase to move from Du Bois College House–a residential building founded as a result of black student protest in the early 1970′s–to Huntsman Hall, the pillar of American business education and global capitalism? What happens to the “grassroots” program when it grows up and “goes corporate?” Where do we locate the mission of Ase today?

Still, despite my preoccupation with the implications of Ase’s expansion, the first seminar proved to be successful beyond my tentative expectations. Ultimately, four students are now enrolled in our seminar, all male, with interests ranging from sports journalism to creative writing and filmmaking. As an introduction to our year-long seminar in Humanities and Social Science research, I selected a short clip from the acclaimed HBO television series, The Wire, which addresses the  problematic implications of academic reseach vis-a-vis questions of representation.

In the approximately two-minute scene from the Season 4 episode entitled, “Home Rooms,” a Caucasian sociologist, Dr. David Parenti, is observed taking detailed notes during an interview between an incarcerated black teen and former police officer Howard “Bunny” Colvin. Parenti, a University of Maryland academic, begins conducting interviews to further his project of reducing the rate of repeat violent offenders. However, as they question the young man about the source of his violent behavior (i.e., “What would you do if you heard your sister got beat up by some guy?”; “Would you go to the police?”) he grows confrontational. In response to Parenti’s incessant note taking, he repeatedly asks, “Why is this m–f–er writing?” and ultimately attempts to physically assault Parenti when he ignores repeated request to stop writing notes conspicuously. Parenti is then forced to flee the room while the young man is restrained by Colvin.

In this short meta-depiction of sociological research, The Wire offers an implicit critique of qualitative research methods and issues of scholarly representation. As numerous critics of the ethnographic method (often attending specifically to its colonialist origins) have noted, the “gaze” of the prototypical, detached researcher often reduces the individuals and populations of study to caricatural objects, stripped of voice and agency in the researcher-”subject” relationship (Asad 1973; hooks 1990; Said 1989).

I offer this scene as an introduction to a seminar on the very methods it critiques to endow students with a critical eye to question the theoretical approaches, methods, and conclusions of the scholars we take up throughout the semester and beyond. Teahcing research methods from an African-centered perspective demands an interrogation of the sociohistorical underpinnings of academic disciplines, specifically as they relate to people of color (Murrell 2002). If Ase intends to foster the next generation of scholars and professionals committed to social justice, it must both challenge dominant discourses on marginalized communities, and engage students as agents in their education and broader social world (Freire 2000[1970])

While students’ responses to the readings remain to be seen, with the first two selections assigned for next Saturday, all four students displayed a willingness to probe the intersections between the course content and their personal interests and aspirations. For the student who intends to pursue a career in sports journalism, we discussed the various ways that sports are taken up academically, as I referenced the work of NYU anthropologist Michael Ralph on basketball camps as a form of neoliberal economic commodity in Senegal, and the ESPN television program, Outside the Lines, which examines the implications of sports to wider societal phenomena.

By referencing a program that the student is familiar with (he watches OTL frequently) I hope to link his interests and experiences to the academic concepts and techniques covered in the course. In this fashion, I again emphasize that “cultural relevancy” can never be assumed or reduced to a student’s racial, ethnic, or other form of identity, but rather demands work on the part of the educator, to engage each student’s personal background, interests, and beliefs.

Along similar lines, we also emphasized the flexibility of the syllabus, and our intention to fashion the content of the seminar to their preexisting interests. This,I hope, can serve as a practical model for “culturally relevant” pedagogy.

Works Cited

Asad, Talal. 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press.

Dewey, John. 1916. Democracy and Education. New York: MacMillan.

Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

hooks, bell. 1990. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press.

Illich, Ivan. 1972. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row.

Murrell, Peter. 2002. African-centered Pedagogy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Said, Edward. 1989. “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors.” Critical Inquiry 15: 205-25.

Ryan Jobson

My Observations of Ase Week 1 & 2

Ase attempts to provide an atmosphere of enthusiasm of learning for the children of West Philadelphia and other neighboring schools.  Ase’s intentions are evident in its goals for the upcoming year: build a family, eliminate the “you are not a project” mentality, expect a certain level of depth in terms of the contact between kids and tutors,  give students tools to survive within their current educational systems in spite of the disadvantage it impose upon them, show genuine investment in their success, locate ourselves on a university campus so we’re able to show students the resources of an acclaimed college campus – it’s college/life prep in a way that different programs aren’t used to/haven’t seen, encourage the students to find their academic passion early, and stress the importance for Ase kids to hear more of our stories

After two weekends of actually working with the children, I feel as though we are drifting away from our mission.  Of course with managing any major program, it takes a few weeks for everything to fall in order.   So this is not a major issue because I know we have had to deal with a few road bumps, and yet still I’ve noticed the mentors have established positive relationships with each of the kids. Last week, I could see the disappointment on the kids’ faces. We did not have all our volunteers due to vacation and midterms.  So it makes sense that we things were a bit disorderly the last couple sessions, but I believe this week we need to show the children our passion.  We were able to garner lots of support for fundraising this week; we should inform them of our endeavors.  Perhaps the kids truly did not like the film or sitting through three hours of test prep which is what may have made them gloomy.  Again, I am not too concerned, but I do not want this to grow into a sense that Ase is not living up to their expectations. We’ve spent the last six weeks prepping for their arrival, and I do not want it to be in vain. I am really looking forward to starting the courses this week.  I know things should turn around once they get rolling.