Learning While Black
Creating Educational Excellence for African American Children
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
In Learning While Black Janice Hale argues that educators must look beyond the cliches of urban poverty and teacher training to explain the failures of public education with regard to black students. Why, Hale asks simply, are black students not being educated as well as white students?
Hale goes beyond finger pointing to search for solutions. Closing the achievement gap of African American children, she writes, does not involve better teacher training or more parental involvement. The solution lies in the classroom, in the nature of the interaction between the teacher and the child. And the key, she argues, is the instructional vision and leadership provided by principals. To meet the needs of diverse learners, the school must become the heart and soul of a broad effort, the coordinator of tutoring and support services provided by churches, service clubs, fraternal organizations, parents, and concerned citizens. Calling for the creation of the "beloved community" envisioned by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Hale outlines strategies for redefining the school as the Family, and the broader community as the Village, in which each child is too precious to be left behind.
"In this book, I am calling for the school to improve traditional instructional practices and create culturally salient instruction that connects African American children to academic achievement. The instruction should be so delightful that the children love coming to school and find learning to be fun and exciting."—Janice Hale
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a wide but welcome swing of the pendulum, Hale (founder of a school for facilitating the intellectual development of African-American preschool children and author of two books on educating black children) fixes her gaze directly upon schools the teachers and the children. Here is a fresh and feisty look at the miseducation of African-American children by a knowledgeable practitioner (and Wayne State University professor of early childhood education), a "call for action directed to the organizations controlled by middle-class African Americans, not to beleaguered individuals themselves." Relying to some extent upon the Waldorf School Movement (an approach that emphasizes children's individuality), Hale offers a solution that recognizes the school as the impetus for inner-city African-American children to achieve upward mobility, relying on help from parents, churches, community volunteers and teachers. Her model attends to those differences between "Afro cultural" themes and "mainstream" ones, which influence the varying academic achievement of African-American children compared with white children's achievement. Cognizant of religion's role in African-Americans' lives, Hale, who holds a master's in religious education, envisions a major role for the African-American church in enriching children's lives. Although the metaphoric basis of her program ("the Family," "the Village" and "the Beloved Community") and the detailed account of her own parenting experiences are occasionally distracting, both add substance to her theory the former by the grandness of its scheme, the latter by attending to nuts and bolts.
