EDUC B308 Inquiries into Black Study, Language Justice, and Education is a spring semester, community-engaged course in which students will embark on Dagbani language and Dagomba cultural learning, site-based internship projects or research, personal inquiry-based research projects, and study that includes a mix of assigned and student-selected texts centering Black scholarship. The course will focus on the individual and interrelationships of topics such as Black Study, African Diaspora & global Black liberation, education, native language/ mother-tongue education, minoritized languages, and community-based organizations and collaborations. The course will explore the implications for education in realizing the significance of global Black liberation and Black Study/ies—particularly in relation to questions of the suppression and sustenance of language diversity and with a focus, as well, on Pan-Africanism—by engaging with one particular community as a touchstone for learning from and forwarding culturally sustaining knowledge. 

The course will ground these topics within the particular context of Laɣim Tehi Tuma (LTT), situated within the Dagomba culture of Northern Ghana. Now entering its ninth year, LTT is a collaboration among educators and community leaders living and working in the village of Daluη, Ghana, together with both the BiCo and the University for Development Studies, all of which nominate students to work as a team each summer in a suite of activities in order to foster collaborative inquiry into the meaning and practice of education in postcolonial and liberatory terms. At the same time, the students will gain direct experience of the histories, musics, memories, values, collective desires, and communities that inform and are performed and protected by the Dagbani language.

With the lived experience of this learning, students will come into study both of community knowledge generation, its conventional (often violent) marginalization by schooling, and avenues for its extension. They will bring this awareness into exploration of Dagomba history and culture; a brief case study of Philadelphia-based Caribbean community education formations; and, if they choose the additional internship intensification option, with LTT’s partner NGOs in Northern Ghana. In this way, the course will act as a portal for engagement that centers and listens for complex (not presumably colonized) orientations to language and thus meaning.

Contact alesnick [at] brynmawr.edu" target="_blank">Professor Alice Lesnick with questions. Learn more about the 2021 Laɣim Tehi Tuma summer fellowship here.

Co-sponsored by the BMC Praxis Program, the Bi-Co Educational Program, the Bi-Co Africana Studies Program, and the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship.