Research - It is important for teachers to avoid rehearsing stereotypes about Africa because it fails to consider the diversity of Africa. Africa is a large continent, not one country. As such, it is important to highlight individual countries' contributions to the continent.
Reflect - The stereotypes in this satirical piece showcase Africans as one monolithic group. It paints Africans in a negative light and sees them primarily as people just to be showcased for their own sake. It is dehumanizing and disgusting to read of Africans in a negative light like this.
Research: Read Brown and Carroll’s text blurb, “Beyond Wildlife: Teaching about Africa & Stereotype” about KWL charts and reflect on your own opening questions. Why is it important for teachers to avoid rehashing stereotypes about Africa when teaching diverse sets of students? Instead, we urge you to open your lessons with a surprising, joyful, wonderful fact about Africans and/or Africa and structure your lesson around this.
This reflects how important it is to be aware of your audience and what you want them to learn. Starting off with stereotypes can make students from the stereotyped culture feel unseen and unwelcome. I feel like this could also reify stereotyped beliefs in the other students, since students would be defining these as things they "know", which generally means "facts they know".
Reflect: After reading Brown and Carroll, read Wainana’s well-known satirical piece, “How to Write About Africa.” Wainana does use stereotypes extensively here. In which way does his approach differ?
Wainana has a very particular audience in mind: a white reader who needs a wake-up call (or an African reader who wants a laugh). He is clear and upfront about addressing stereotypes, and his goal is to demonstrate how ridiculous and two-dimensional those stereotypes are. He is directly confronting and ridiculing the stereotypes. In contrast, I feel like letting students ruminate on stereotypes in a serious, scholarly manner (without explicitly stating that students are analyzing stereotypes) could lend those stereotypes credibility.
Research: Read Brown and Carroll’s text blurb, “Beyond Wildlife: Teaching about Africa & Stereotype” about KWL charts and reflect on your own opening questions. Why is it important for teachers to avoid rehashing stereotypes about Africa when teaching diverse sets of students? Instead, we urge you to open your lessons with a surprising, joyful, wonderful fact about Africans and/or Africa and structure your lesson around this.
This was a really interesting read! In teaching about Africa, I have definitely found that students think they "know" things that are really just stereotypes. To head this off, I have often started with an activity from Ithaca College's Project Look Sharp: https://www.projectlooksharp.org/front_end.php?kit_id=20 The lesson on Unearthing Stereotypes has students look at 12 photos (some that are the type that Wainana wrote about, others which are simply regular people doing familiar things, or big cities, etc.). Students silently write in their notebooks if they think each image is from Africa. After going through all of the images, I tell them they are all from Africa. Then students respond in their journals about how it feels to see what they thought they knew vs. what was reality. They write really thoughtfully about the biases and stereotypes they didn't know they had. Only after that reflection do we discuss as a class, sharing the exciting new things we learned about Africa just from looking at the photos. Then we talk about how diverse the continent is in cultures, landscapes, architecture, and more.
Reflect: After reading Brown and Carroll, read Wainana’s well-known satirical piece, “How to Write About Africa.” Wainana does use stereotypes extensively here. In which way does his approach differ?
This piece was a total roast of well-meaning liberals, and it hit the nail on the head. I find that students often feel "bad" for Africa and Africans, without having any clear sense why. They have vague notions of starving and long walks to water and hot dusty places. They also of course know all about the wildlife. I think getting called out like this is useful because it provides a clear what-not-to-do.
I appreciate the cautionary word regarding starting with "what you know," especially when teaching a diverse set of students. The "what you know" question can simply prompt students to reiterate the stereotypes and flat depictions of Africa they have been exposed to. The "Beyond Wildlife" piece leveraged the stereotypes students might have in interesting ways and used them to build a connection between students and real people from African countries (namely, that those people had limited exposure to "wildlife" other than through zoos or parks, just like an average person in the U.S.).
The piece by Binyavanga Wainaina highlights the stereotypes many non-Africans hold by stating them in over-the-top ways, revealing how ridiculous it is to portray Africa and African people in these ways. The clear targeting of those who even seem well-intentioned - who "fell in love with the place and can’t live without her" - is a particularly stinging but needed angle on the issue.
The "wildlife" piece has cautioned me away from starting with a "what you know" question, and I am in fact considering the Wainaina piece as a provocative way to get students thinking about their own assumptions and biases (especially as I teach high school seniors, who would respond well to the tone of the article, I think).