This text provides teachers with a process for making explicit an African episteme that serves as a foundation for African Diasporan socio-history. Teachers can then conceptualize curriculum and shape instruction that locates people in all cultures as subjects with agency whose actions embody cultural legacy.
Moving beyond the content integration approach of multicultural education, this text powerfully advocates for the importance of curriculum built upon authentic knowledge construction informed by the Black intellectual tradition and an African episteme. By retrieving, examining, and reconnecting the continuity of African Diasporan heritage with school knowledge, this volume aims to repair the rupture that has silenced this cultural memory in standard historiography in general and in PK-12 curriculum content and pedagogy in particular. This ethically informed curriculum approach not only allows students of African ancestry to understand where they fit in the world but also makes the accomplishments and teachings of our collective ancestors available for the benefit of all. King and Swartz provide readers with a process for making overt and explicit the values, actions, thoughts, and behaviors reflected in an African episteme that serves as the foundation for African Diasporan sociohistorical phenomenon/events. With such knowledge, teachers can conceptualize curriculum and shape instruction that locates people in all cultures as subjects with agency whose actions embody their ongoing cultural legacy.
'This book is a very welcome addition to knowledge.? It offers a powerful rendition of the rich intellectual traditions of African cultural knowledge base as a powerful source of African Indigenous episteme and their place in curriculum development in Diasporic contexts and beyond.? The book clearly adds to emerging critical scholarship on the diversity of cultural heritage knowledge that all students need to be abreast with in order to comprehend the histories of ideas, events and developments that have shaped our complex and intertwined human journeys.'
-George J Sefa Dei, Professor of Social Justice Education OISE, University of Toronto & Fellow, Royal Society of Canada
'Heritage Knowledge in the Curriculum: Retrieving an African Episteme continues and extends the brilliant body of educational work done by two of the finest scholars in the field. I am deeply impressed by Joyce E. King and Ellen E. Swartz's appreciation for the African episteme in reconnecting students to authentic knowledge. This book will become the standard by which all others in the field will be evaluated.'
-Molefi Kete Asante is author of Revolutionary Pedagogy.
