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Towards an Education That (Re)members

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-3676900

2164-0041

Cynthia B. Dillard,

Diverse Education Studies and Reforms

Jacqueline is a twenty-one-year-old Black female. She is introspective and soft-spoken, reflecting her modest, humble Christian upbringing where one speaks only when spoken to and lowers one's eyes in the presence of elders. Her curly brown hair is often straightened or pulled back in a bun and dark- rimmed glasses frame her skin, the color of butterscotch. Often dressed in university apparel, she came to the university from a community college. When we first met, she was a junior studying early childhood education and minoring in sociology. Through much hard work on both of our parts, she received a scholarship that enabled her to study abroad in Ghana. That was the beginning of her transformative experience.When Jacqueline shared with me the reasons she wanted to travel to Ghana, she raised her eyes and looked deeply into mine: She knew that the stories she'd heard about Black people—from continent to diaspora—did not accurately describe what she knew experientially in her bones. She had a spiritual longing to understand the deeper meaning of blackness and to understand herself as a Black person. "I have to go to Ghana. It's a spiritual calling," she said. "When you came into my . . . class discussing the Ghana study abroad trip, something told me that I needed to be on that trip to Ghana. As the only African American girl in that class, I knew that I would have a deep connection to Africa."When applying to study abroad, she spoke of the importance of being around other Black women as mentors and guides. In her view, this was critical to understanding herself as a Black woman teacher. But there was sadness on her face as we talked further. "I have never had a Black teacher," she whispered. "But this trip would guarantee that I'd finally have an African American teacher (professor), a role model to look up to that looks like me, since there are so few."As might be imagined, experiences in Ghana were life- changing for Jacqueline, as demonstrated by this excerpt from her final paper:Ghana was so essential because I learned and found my identity through culture and history of my race. From exiting 'The Door of No Return' and coming back and entering through 'The Door of Return' I had proven that a descendant, at least one, could just briefly return to Africa, and that despite the cruel betrayals, bitter ocean voyages, and hurtful centuries, we were still recognizable. Despite the horrid, inhumane dungeons, I received the word, the connection of my people, healing my wounds of self- doubt and low esteem and feeling proud, having a sense of empowerment, and loving my blackness as a woman.Jacqueline's narrative raises a number of troubling issues in the education of Black girls and women and the ways our minds, bodies, and spirits continue to be harmed by educational experiences that: 1) fail to acknowledge the visibility and centrality of our culture, race, and gender historically or contemporarily; 2) render invisible or totally disregards spirit and spirituality as animating forces in our lives; 3) do little to honor the creativity and contributions of Black people from the African continent including African Americans and others in the African diaspora. Patricia Williams argues that this disregard murders the spirit of Blacks in school and society. With racism as a foundational fact of the U.S., education too often continues to alienate Blacks from our culture and teaches us in ways that causes injury to our spirits. Many argue that such assaults on Black children's lives are grounded in a deliberate and collective national amnesia about who we are, the events that have happened in the various (and often troubled) histories of this nation and the world, who has benefited from telling particular stories of those histories, and the absent dialogues that our collective society has been unwilling to have. Still others argue racism is a permanent part of the landscape of this nation and is a continued barrier to creating the beloved communities across differences, that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called for decades ago. Still other marginalized peoples, including Native Americans and Latinos, also face similar spirit- murder and destruction of memory in the education system.What is the education that can help us heal these deep wounds and help us to see each other across our differences more clearly? In my book, Learning to (Re)member the Things We've Learned to Forget, I examined the ways that centering spirituality in education transforms the very foundations of education, creating sites for spiritual healing and service to the world. While such a stance is particularly important in the education of Blacks and other people of color, I am suggesting that centering culture, race, identity, and spirituality is work that has the potential to heal and serve us all. Looking back, a central thread in Jacqueline's story is that identities matter: social identities (i.e. racial, gender, sexual, ability, etc.), identities embedded in roles (i.e. teacher, mother, mentor, etc.), and spiritual identities or identities that may be based in religion, but may also be "the evidence of things unseen," matter. I am also suggesting here that the work of constructing identities is deeply embedded in acts of memory and of (re) membering. Memory can be thought of as a thing, person, or event that brings to mind and heart a past experience. But (re)membering is both the ability to recall that experience (or think of again) and the ability to put it back together again (to re- "member"). From my view, as spiritual beings having a human experience, we already know in spirit who we are and our work in the world. Thus our human experience provides us space and time to act like we know that.For many students of color, embracing an ethic that opens to spirit is fundamental to the nature of learning and education. But educational spaces like schools are always and in all ways also political, cultural, situated, embodied, and spiritual. Too often, Black students like Jacqueline are encouraged or forced to forget who they are (or have chosen to do so), given the weight and power of memories in their present lives. This is where study abroad programs like the one Jacqueline experienced in Ghana can be so important. But they are not enough. Teaching those most marginalized by society must begin with an alternative orientation to traditional education: it must embrace a new sense of the world. Thus, education that addresses inequality begins within local lived experiences of Black students, with local communities serving as bridges to understanding one's place in the world. Such understandings arise through critically examining the knowledge and cultural productions of Black people's historical, economic, and cultural stories and struggles. This expansive examination can cultivate learning and teaching based in new ways of seeing, feeling, hearing, understanding, and links to global understandings of education, contributions, and engagements of Black peoples. Assume that the knowledge, wisdom, and ways of our ancestors are a central and present part of everything that has existed, is existing, and will exist in what we call the future. If so, then education that addresses the harm and injury of exclusions and oppressions must also undertake an often unnamed and oft- forgotten task that is important for individuals like Jacque-line who want to understand ways of being and knowing that have been marginalized in the world and in formal education. Simply put, we must learn to (re)member the things that we've learned to forget.Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah, in his book KMT in the house of life: An epistemic novel, says that Black people are and have always been thinkers and sharers. But we think, he says, in order to share. This is a crucial first step in creating and sharing counter- stories of the brilliance and beauty of Black life. (Re)membering our identities is like weaving kente, the magnificently beautiful cloth of Ghana. Kente is a useful metaphor for (re)membering and weaving identity together again. The processes of (re)membering identity are like the warp of kente cloth: they literally hold the cloth (and our personhood) together. Like kente, the work of constructing one's identity also creates unique designs and 'colors' given a person's upbringing, education, and experiences. Like the weft of woven cloth, this process of (re)membering identities (particularly racial and ethnic identities) also creates unique designs and individual ways of being as we engage the processes of education.Jacqueline's process of (re)membering Black identity, like so many Black youth and adults in schools and universities today, shows us several powerful transformations of body, mind, and spirit. She shows us that both recalling who we are and putting ourselves back together is our education. Each person enacts processes of (re)membering differently based on who they are. Enacting a sacred and spiritual process of (re)membering who we are in relation to diverse knowledges, cultures, places, and people is work we do from the inside out and from one soul to another. This is not necessarily a linear process, as engagements and enactments are shaped by the life experiences of each person. However, in learning to (re)member, we are acknowledging that there are important spiritual lessons we may have once known as people, but that we have learned or been forced to forget. As we learn to (re)member through uncovering and discovering our diverse identities, we initially engage in the process of (re) searching, seeking, looking, and searching again. In Jacqueline's case, she was searching for Black heritage to teach her something new about herself—and about others. But I am suggesting here that, as we engage with one another across our diverse identities, everyone is engaged in (re)search, in trying to understand and be aware of another. And what we are searching for is what Thich Nhat Hanh calls our true identity, with the goal to see ourselves as spiritual beings engaging in a human experience, on purpose for a purpose.This process of learning to (re)member also involves (re) visioning, expanding our vision and worldview beyond just what we can see towards what womanist scholar Oyèrónkẹ́. Oyěwùmí calls a world sense. This involves an awakening to what we hear, touch, feel, and intuit and acknowledging the spiritual "evidence of things unseen." We read this as Jacqueline articulated her new visions of Africa and herself. Another part of the processes of learning to (re)member is (re)cognizing, the process of changing our thinking and our minds about who we are in relation to one another. In Jacqueline's case, she quite literally changed her mind about who Black people were, what Black people have accomplished, and the sociocultural brilliance of Black people from Africa to the diaspora and back again. While (re)cognizing is often manifest as a change in mind, it also includes shifts in our heart: it involves thinking about our very selves again in light of our encounters. In this process of learning, we also begin (re)presenting ourselves differently in the world, literally putting our understandings of our own and other's identities and culture in the world in new and fuller ways. There is an African proverb that says, "Until the lion tells his own story, the story will always glorify the hunter." These acts of (re)presention are where the lion begins to speak his or her own story, a kind of truth- telling that disrupts what has passed as universal narratives of humanity towards more specific stories as they have been lived by very diverse peoples. Finally, there is a (re)claiming, where we (re)member in order to claim and embrace the multiple legacies we are a part of (in Jacqueline's case, of African people and history) and to take our place within these legacies. The Akan people of Ghana describe this process of (re)membering as sankofa: where we learn from our gatherings of the past in order to build for the future.In an interview with Bernice Johnson Reagan, of acapella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, J.M. Latta spoke of an important consideration in creating spaces for an education that (re)members: "History is sacred because it is the only chance that you have of knowing who you are outside of what's been rained down upon you from a hostile environment. And when you go to the documents created inside the culture, you get another story. You get another history. The history is sacred and the highest, most hallowed songs in tones are pulled into service to deliver that story."We heard through Jacqueline's encounters with African knowledge and culture in Ghana that those encounters mattered deeply to her sense of being as a Black woman teacher. We heard in her voice (re)claimations of connection, kinship, and healed identities. Learning to (re)member in Ghana allowed her to resist the oppressive narratives of Black women's lives that have been constructed worldwide and to create new identities that empowered and changed her view of Black life. Through her processes of (re)membering, she created an identity drawing on the past. We witnessed in Jacqueline's voice what it meant to take up the sacred operationally, to wrestle and (re)member as deeply situated and healing processes which implied several engagements that are instructive for teachers of Black children.The first lesson was that she was drawn into and present in a spiritual heritage homeland, in this case, Ghana, West Africa. It is critical that we provide opportunities for Black students to very explicitly experience their heritage and culture, not simply as an important engagement, but as a human right. Whether through experiential global engagements with African and other Black heritage sites such as monuments and museums or bringing the world into our classrooms in other exciting ways, children should have the opportunity to learn and to be in spaces that affirm their heritage, their culture, and their spirits. In Jacqueline's story, we also learned that these engagements are not just important for our students, they are critical for Black teachers and those who care about Black teachers and students. As teachers, one question we might ask of our practice is this: in what ways do I provide learning spaces for my students (assignments, experiences, resources, materials) that affirm the heritage, culture, and spirit of all of my students?Second, Jacqueline was engaged with the rituals, people, and places (of Ghana) in intimate and authentic ways. As we examine our teaching practices, we might ask in what ways our students engage curriculum and lessons in authentic and intimate ways, especially in relation to Black heritage, culture, and spiritualities. For many Black children, post- integration schooling has done little to affirm the contributions, knowledges, and spiritual perspectives of African and African diasporic heritage, leaving our children without the recognition of themselves as builders of civilizations and producers of knowledge and culture from a long line of Black brilliance and legacy. A question for teachers is this: how might I engage and learn about the rituals, people, and culture of Africa (and by extension, African Americans and others in the African diaspora) in ways that are authentic, intimate, and life-affirming? This is not a question of "adding on" to the common core or other curricular mandates. As we saw in Jacqueline's (re)membering processes, it is a matter of (re)visioning the entire curricular process to meet the educational, social, and spiritual needs of Black students and other students whose cultures and heritages are not readily found in curriculum and educational practices today.Finally, Jacqueline's story helps us see that, as a future Black woman teacher, she was open to being transformed by her education in Ghana and recognized those encounters as purposeful and expansive, as acts of healing. For Jacqueline, the catalyst and context to (re)member was Ghana, West Africa. However, within our schools, universities, and broader society, we have the responsibility to (re)member Black identities and the rich heritage of Black peoples from Africa and her diaspora, and to place our students' learning against a transnational Black backdrop, wherever we might be. I am suggesting that we shift our engagements as Jacqueline did, to embrace more sacred (re)membering that is, at its core, about healing and social justice. As Jacqueline's (re)membering showed us: we must not only engage our teaching differently, we must learn to be differently.