Effective Teaching and Learning: Decolonizing the Curriculum

Abstract

Why is the universal starting point of Black identity positioned around the history of colonialism, slavery, and servitude taught as damaged histories within the curriculum and disseminated through a Eurocentric viewpoint? How do we put back together a fractured, self-consciousness in an educational setting that negates the affective, conative, and cognitive domains of Black learner identities? The aim of this article is to identify, describe, evaluate, and then challenge through classroom practice (praxis) the prevailing myth of Black African Caribbean inferiority in the schooling process. It is concerned with the educational damage to Black children as a group who have culturally been identified in the literature as having negative experiences and low achievement outcomes in mainstream schooling. Utilizing Afrocentricity as the paradigmatic shift, the study described in this article was conducted to support those Black students’ affective, conative, and cognitive domains within an African episteme of guided group pedagogy. The classroom fieldwork described, over an intense 4-month period, used the researcher’s reframed units of change.