Education as Freedom

African American Educational Thought and Activism

Contributions by A. A Akom, Ojeya Cruz Banks, Eric A. Hurley, Karen A. Johnson, Judith King-Calnek, Daniel Perlstein, Sabrina Ross Edited by Noel S. Anderson, Haroon Kharem

Not available to order

Publication date:

16 January 2009

Length of book:

242 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739132609

Before the founding of the United States, enslaved Africans advocated literacy as a method of emancipation. During the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, blacks were at the forefront of the debates on the establishment of public schools in the South. In fact, a wealth of ideas about the role of education in American freedom and progress emerged from African American civic, political, and religious communities and was informed by the complexity of the Black experience in America. Education as Freedom: African American Educational Thought and Activism is a groundbreaking edited text that documents and reexamines African-American empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions to knowledge-making, teaching, and learning and American education from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century, the most dynamic period of African-American educational thought and activism. African-American thought and activism regarding education burgeoned from traditional academic disciplines, such as philosophy and art, mathematics and the natural sciences, and history and psychology; from the Black church as well as from grassroot political, social, cultural, and educational activism, with the desire to assess the stake of African Americans in modernity.

Part 1 Introduction. Education as Freedom: African American Educational Thought and Activism
Part 2 Section I. From Bondage to Freedom: Early African American Educational Thought and Activism
Chapter 3 Chapter 1. Medical Doctor, Integrationist, and Black Nationalist: Dr. James McCune Smith and the Dilemma of Antebellum Intellectual Black Activist
Chapter 4 Chapter 2. John Mercer Langston and the Shaping of African American Education in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 5 Chapter 3. On Classical vs. Vocational Training: The Educational Ideas of Anna Julia Cooper and Nannie Helen Burroughs
Part 6 Section II. This Skin I'm In: African American Identity and Education
Chapter 7 Chapter 4. Womanist Conceptualizations of African-Centered Critical Multiculturalism: Creating New Possibilities of Thinking about Social Justice
Chapter 8 Chapter 5. The Performance Gap: Stereotype Threat, Assessment, and the Education of African American Children
Chapter 9 Chapter 6. Katherine Dunham: Decolonizing Dance Education
Part 10 Section III. Advancing the Race: African American Education and Social Progress
Chapter 11 Chapter 7. Live the Truth: Politics and Pedagogy in the African-American Movement for Freedom and Liberation
Chapter 12 Chapter 8. Black Schools, White Schools: Derrick Bell, Race, and the Failure of the Integration Ideal in Brown
Chapter 13 Chapter 9. Research for Liberation: DuBois, the Chicago School, and the Development of Black Emancipatory Action Research

For African Americans, education has historically been a double-edged sword: it has been used both as a source of oppression and of liberation. In Education as Freedom, Anderson and Kharem lay out a set of strategies and a framework that can be used by educators, scholars, and activists to utilize education as the foundation for the freedom struggle in the twenty first century and beyond. This book is an insightful and inspiring resource.