The course offers a lens into the study of Africa that highlights African knowledge producers while taking up the study of the continent and its peoples through various disciplinary angles. The course will support elementary educators in building a curriculum project. The course explicitly aims to deconstruct Western, Eurocentric views in perspectives on Africa. We invite you to engage with this course with curiosity & joy as you develop a curriculum resource to use in your classrooms.
This course has been designed with the generous support of the Boston University African Studies Center, K-16 African Studies Center.
By the end of the course, participants will:
- Reflect on how books, media, schooling, and popular culture shape what people in the United States and other Western contexts believe about Africa—and recognize why it is important to question stereotypes and incomplete stories.
- Build a stronger understanding of Africa’s diverse places, peoples, environments, and communities, with attention to how people live, work, create, and connect across the continent.
- Identify important African societies, historical periods, systems of leadership, and ways of knowing that existed before European colonization.
- Explore ways to center African voices, knowledge, stories, arts, music, scientific contributions, mathematics, political ideas, and contemporary popular culture in elementary social studies, science, math, literacy, and arts instruction.
- Create a classroom-ready teaching resource that connects an Africa-related topic, text, question, or theme to your grade level and subject area
