Education of African Canadian Children


Book Description

Hundreds of thousands of African Canadian children demand and deserve quality education that promotes success both within and outside of school. Recognizing that the education these young people receive will shape their lives as citizens, the contributors to this volume provide an important, timely analysis of the educational experiences of African Canadian children and youth. With contributions from leading and emerging scholars, The Education of African Canadian Children critically responds to and comments on the historical, cultural, institutional, and informational contexts and problems of the learning lives of these children. The authors offer a comprehensive history of African Canadians’ encounters with the education system, the current challenges they are facing, and opportunities for more inclusive and democratic educational practices that will better serve this population. Advocating for cultural redemption and learning success for a population that is not being served well by Canadian public education systems, this book will benefit teachers, students, government program managers, policy makers, and educational researchers. The first multi-authored work of its kind, The Education of African Canadian Children opens new debates and possibilities for change for those concerned with education in their communities and their country.




How Black and Working Class Children Are Deprived of Basic Education in Canada


Book Description

This book is the culmination of twenty-four years of research. It explores the thematic intersections of race, class, immigration, and the potential of building student-centered classrooms. Of course, the building of a truly student-centered is itself a slow and contested process. Over the years, progressive changes towards more inclusive education made by some governments were dismantled by others, and have left disadvantaged children where they were before the study was launched. In the meantime, the system has perfected the process of streaming minority children to dead-end courses that betray the social and economic mobility advertised to them. This book examines the moments and positions of educational betrayal in which racialized and working class students disproportionately find themselves. For many, at that point the only option is to drop out of school and engage in the drug trade or other lifestyles that put them at further risk. This is a longitudinal study of a kind with respect to reform and changes retained in education. It started with eight months observation of a split level grade five and six classroom in September 1986. That was instrumental in identifying the uphill battle that black, working class and new immigrant children and their parents were facing to secure the education they deserved. Through continued reviews, observation and follow up interviews change or lack of it was traced. The results call for urgent overhaul of the way education is provided to all children. The book ends with suggestions to effect change.




Educating African Canadians


Book Description

This book offers a critical assessment of the experiences of African Canadian students, exploring strategies that will serve to enhance their academic success. Writing from their respective locations as students, parents, teachers, counsellors, professors and researchers, the contributors to this collection alert readers to many of the challenges that African Canadians face in the educational system. They discuss new initiatives and suggest new directions that might improve the academic success of Black students. Educating African Canadians offers practical suggestions that can enhance the education not only of African Canadian students, but of all students. An Our Schools/Our Selves book.




New Perspectives on African-Centred Education in Canada


Book Description

New Perspectives on African-Centred Education in Canada is the first study of African-centred schooling in the Canadian context. Starting with an in-depth look at the creation of an Africentric public school within the Toronto District School Board, it tells the story of the movement behind that school's creation and lays bare a rich history of activism, organization, and resistance on the part of numerous African Canadian communities and their allies. The book presents a critical overview of the issues facing racialized students and offers a unique vision of African-centred education as a strategy for student engagement and social transformation. The authors, well known public commentators on African-centred education in Canada, offer a comprehensive analysis of the media controversy surrounding African-centred schools, as well as candid reflections on the personal challenges of fighting a largely unpopular battle.




The African Canadian Legal Odyssey


Book Description

The African Canadian Legal Odyssey explores the history of African Canadians and the law from the era of slavery until the early twenty-first century. ;This collection demonstrates that the social history of Blacks in Canada has always been inextricably bound to questi52.99ons of law, and that the role of the law in shaping Black life was often ambiguous and shifted over time. Comprised of eleven engaging chapters, organized both thematically and chronologically, it includes a substantive introduction that provides a synthesis and overview of this complex history. This outstanding collection will appeal to both advanced specialists and undergraduate students and makes an important contribution to an emerging field of scholarly inquiry.




African Canadian Leadership


Book Description

Challenging the myth of African Canadian leadership "in crisis," this book opens a broad vista of inquiry into the many and dynamic ways leadership practices occur in Black Canadian communities. Exploring topics including Black women’s contributions to African Canadian communities, the Black Lives Matter movement, Black LGBTQ, HIV/AIDS advocacy, motherhood and grieving, mentoring, and anti-racism, contributors appraise the complex history and contemporary reality of blackness and leadership in Canada. With Canada as a complex site of Black diasporas, contributors offer an account of multiple forms of leadership and suggest that through surveillance and disruption, practices of self-determined Black leadership are incompatible with, and threatening to, White "structures" of power in Canada. As a whole, African Canadian Leadership offers perspectives that are complex, non-aligned, and in critical conversation about class, gender, sexuality, and the politics of African Canadian communities.




Social Justice Education in Canada


Book Description

This engaging edited collection highlights key discussions around educational inequity and related structures and sub-structures. Featuring a diverse array of contributors, Social Justice Education in Canada balances important knowledge, learning practices, and possibilities emanating from and embedded in anti-racist and anti-oppressive education with instructive, grounding examples. The text confronts the idea of social justice as an abstract concept, discussing suggestions for rethinking educational systems and making changes that will benefit the learning lives of all students. With the aim to critically expand the emerging and increasingly active debates in this important area of educational and social development, this volume strives to collectively deepen our understanding and appreciation for critical social justice education. Organized into 14 chapters and featuring an epilogue written by Dr. Edward Shizha, the book critically deals with contemporary topical issues in education, including readings on cultural, racial, religious, Indigenous, language, socio-economic, citizenship, disability/ableism, and immigrant/refugee status realities and their interwoven learning and teaching intersections. This text is an essential resource for undergraduate and graduate students of education across Canada. FEATURES: - Designed to spark discussions and debates, each chapter closes with discussion questions to encourage critical reflection - Contributors move beyond the theoretical with actionable, practical applications for critical social justice that can be utilized by educators and teacher educators - Intersecting topical diversity is at the forefront of this volume, which features contributors from different backgrounds and communities critically engaging with issues pertinent to social justice and equity in education




“Where Are You From?”


Book Description

Metro Vancouver is a diverse city where half the residents identify as people of colour, but only one percent of the population is racialized as Black. In this context, African-Canadians are both hyper-visible as Black, and invisible as distinct communities. Informed by feminist and critical race theories, and based on interviews with women and men who grew up in Vancouver, "Where Are You From?" recounts the unique experience of growing up in a place where the second generation seldom sees other people who look like them, and yet are inundated with popular representations of Blackness from the United States. This study explores how the second generation in Vancouver redefine their African identities to distinguish themselves from African-Americans, while continuing to experience considerable everyday racism that challenges belonging as Canadians. As a result, some members of the second generation reject, and others strongly assert, a Canadian identity.




The SAGE Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America


Book Description

The Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America provides an accessible ready reference on the retention and continuity of African culture within the United States. Our conceptual framework holds, first, that culture is a form of self-knowledge and knowledge about self in the world as transmitted from one person to another. Second, that African people continuously create their own cultural history as they move through time and space. Third, that African descended people living outside of Africa are also contributors to and participate in the creation of African cultural history. Entries focus on illuminating Africanisms (cultural retentions traceable to an African origin) and cultural continuities (ongoing practices and processes through which African culture continues to be created and formed). Thus, the focus is more culturally specific and less concerned with the broader transatlantic demographic, political and geographic issues that are the focus of similar recent reference works. We also focus less on biographies of individuals and political and economic ties and more on processes and manifestations of African cultural heritage and continuity. FEATURES: A two-volume A-to-Z work, available in a choice of print or electronic formats 350 signed entries, each concluding with Cross-references and Further Readings 150 figures and photos Front matter consisting of an Introduction and a Reader’s Guide organizing entries thematically to more easily guide users to related entries Signed articles concluding with cross-references




Black Girlhood and Identity in Canadian Elementary Schools


Book Description

This volume uses interviews and narratives data from self-identified Black women reflecting on their childhood in the Canadian public school system, to explore voice and agency, girlhood, and identity in Canada’s elementary schools. Exploring themes of race, gender, identity, friendship, dreams, authority, and success, the author showcases diversity in Black Canadian feminism and gives voice and agency to Black female stories that have traditionally been absent amongst the literary canon of education. An intimate and compelling scholarly exploration, it contributes to conversations around transforming the Black girl narrative in public education and will appeal to researchers, faculty, and post-graduate students with interests in race and ethnicity in education, gender studies, and multicultural education.