Podcast 409, Teaching Africa and Challenging Perceptions in Schools (29-11-20)

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney

On this week's podcast I interview the editors of a book titled Challenging perceptions of Africa in schools: Critical approaches to global justice education. They are my colleague Dr. Barbara O'Toole, from the Marino Institute of Education and Dr. Ebun Joseph and Dr. David Nyaluke from University College Dublin. Among the topics we discussed on the programme are the following:

• How our education system is focused on a Eurocentric view of people from Africa
• Chimamanda and the Danger of a single story
• What teachers are doing well when presenting Africa to their students
• How history is taught impacts on the past and on life today
• The need to hear the story of Africa from a different perspective
• How our system encourages us to perform racism
• The benefits of reading African authors to see how they represent Africa
• The need to present a balanced story of Africa
• Why discussing Africa with a deficit perspective needs to be balanced with a discussion of its strengths
• Negative portrayal of Africa in Irish primary school textbooks
• The need for unlearning: self-questioning and reflection
• What critical race theory is (a theoretical framework and an analytical framework)
• White Teacher by Vivian Gussin Paley
• Knowledge justice
• The River Between by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
• Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe
• Books by Ali Mazrui.
• How Europe is portrayed in African education
• Decolonising education and Alice Feldman
• How this affects every subject across the curriculum
• Just Connections, Just Trade resource for teachers
• The importance to develop a race consciousness and how race impacts on people’s experiences
• There is a stereotype in all our work – we need to think about how we can erase them
• Being in a crisis of knowledge and a crisis of solutions
• Moving to a mindset of social justice can permeate every aspect of a teacher’s teaching
• Relative size of Africa compared to Europe and the United States