Culture-Based Education

Features

Racially based enslavement and oppression resulted in conflict between European-based mainstream popular views and views that acknowledged links with Africa and its descendants. W. E. B. Du Bois termed this conflict “double consciousness.” He believed its resolution was to use African American culture as the basis for navigating U.S. society. Culture-based education codifies and reconciles these dual perspectives through critical thinking and interactive discourse.

Across Africa's ethnic groups and throughout the diaspora, that which is interpreted as spiritual is given central importance. Furthermore, religious and secular thought is inseparable. For instance, God is perceived as existing in every living thing and as part of daily affairs. Additionally, there is a notion that the soul survives death by becoming an ancestor and is enlisted to guide daily activities and cause psychophysical interactions and therapeutics. Culture-based education employs aspects of spiritual reverence to foster resiliency by using it as a basis for overcoming challenges (for example, through God all things are possible).

African American learning styles reflect distinctive behaviors that affect learning and classroom social interactions. Factors that may affect learning are the African American conceptual orientation, which leans toward categorizing information according to function, verve (receptiveness to high sensate stimulation), and affect (emphasis of emotion or feelings). Factors that may affect social interaction are the African American propensity for attending to and communicating using nonverbal behaviors, expressive individualism (distinctive personality and spontaneity), orality (preference for oral modalities), and social time (time passes through social rather than material space), less concern about personal space, value placed on words that embody themes of social needs and racial desegregation, preference for cooperative efforts over individual endeavors, and response to the authority figure within a kinship network while successively moving toward independence. Culture-based education promotes active group-based learning that praises individual contribution to the group's goal and subscribes to discussions that incorporate emotional interpretations of sociohistorical experiences.

African Americans have a vibrant linguistic style. Many orators maintain attention and simplify information while using a rhythmic preaching style filled with repetition and call-response features. Recognition within the African American community is garnered through superior oral telling characterized by meandering from the point to take on episodic frames; signifying characterized by talking about listeners to drive home a point or initiate verbal war; and verbal dueling known in various regions as “woofing,” “joining,” or “playing the dozens.” Signifying incorporates simile and metaphor building figurative language understanding. Culture-based education uses rhythmic call-response features to assist students in remembering declarative and procedural information and employs oral telling and debates.

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