Educating the African American and Latino Male Child by Jawanza Kunjufu

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Educating the African American and Latino Male
Childby Jawanza Kunjufu

• Aaron Shelby
• Descatur Potier
• Danny Lora
• Rebecca Johnson

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Tufts Colleagues with Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu
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Professions
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NBA What are the odds?

• 1,000,000 boys and girls wish to be in the NBA
• 400,000 make their high school basketball team
• 4,000 play in college
• 35 make it to the NBA
• ONLY 7 starters
• Average NBA career is 4 years

• Whats your back up plan?
• Whats your back up career?

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African American Males in Penal System
70 drug related
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Difference in spending

• United States
• 28,000 annually per prisoner with 85
  recidivism

• Europe
• 6,000 on drug treatment programs with 66
  efficacy

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Whats the cost?

• In Maryland
• Mentoring one youth in a one-to-one program for
  1000-1500 per year
• Vs.
• Spending up to 80,000 a year to house one youth
  in a correctional or rehabilitation facility.

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Raising expectations for every student
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Curriculum

• Create culturally relevant curriculum for all
  students in the classroom.
• Use current trends and ideologies to your
  advantage in terms of lesson plans.
• Have students play an active role in creating
  curriculum.

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How should you create your lessons?

• Tailor your lessons to the characteristics and
  needs of the young, Black male children
• High activity
• Hands-on learning
• Non-verbal and verbal communication,
• Colorful language
• Link it to social context

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What else should be in your lessons?

• Character education must be included in the
  curriculum
• Teachers must know the students are intelligent

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Avoiding Special Education

• Assessing for right brain learners and plan a
  proportional amount of lessons them
• If 50 are right-brain learners then 50 of
  lessons should be right brain lessons
• Non-traditional forms of assessment
• Oral presentation of knowledge for projects
  rather than written testing of knowledge
• Teach how to study in groups
• Looping Teachers
• Incorporate Multicultural Curriculum

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Application in School

• Multi-cultural history courses as electives
• Incorporate multicultural perspectives into
  lessons when missing from current curriculum.
• Help plan and teach a non white mans history
  course. Focuses on the contributions of African,
  African American, and Latin societies.

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Application in School

• Cut achievement or curriculum gap?
• Replace questions with predetermined answers with
  open ended questions in all classes, not just the
  honors and AP classes
• Multicultural friendly atmosphere in school
  office makes parents more receptive to
  involvement.

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What is the schools job?

• PSAT/NMSQT in the10th and 11th grades
• Assure curriculum back mapping from high school
  to middle school
• instructional supports first time AP students
• professional development for middle and high
  school teachers

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Exposure to positive male role models
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Mentoring Programs

• Be developmental in nature
• Provide for the presence of competent adult Black
  males (mentors)
• Capitalize on the strengths of African American
  families
• Incorporate African/African American culture
• Include a Celebratory/"Rites-of-Passage"
  experience

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What should be in the Rites of Passage Program?

• Culturally relevant curriculum that empowers
  students
• Teachers must re-teach what it means to be a man
• Developmentally appropriate
• Responsive to cultural diversity
• Provided by high-quality teachers
• Nurtures social-emotional competence

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Nguzo Saba

• Unity
• Self Determination
• Collective Work and Responsibility
• Cooperative Economics
• Purpose
• Creativity
• Faith

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Results of Mentoring Program

• Better attendance
• Improved academic performance,
• Positive relationships with peers and adults
• Reduced criminal acts, substance abuse, and
  suspensions from schools for youth who
  participated in mentor programs

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How to support mentoring programs?

• Become an ambassador for mentoring
• Create a mentoring program through a club,
  association, fraternity/sorority, Faith-based
  institution or place of employment
• Hold National Mentoring Month events on campus
• Hold a Job/University Shadowing Day
• Consider supporting mentoring programs with
  financial or in-kind resources

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Mentorship

• Call Me Mister Program
• The Call Me MISTER program is an effort to
  address the critical shortage of African American
  male teachers particularly among the State's
  lowest performing schools. Program participants
  are selected from among under-served,
  socio-economically disadvantaged and
  educationally at-risk communities. The project
  provides
• Tuition assistance for admitted students pursuing
  approved programs of study at participating
  colleges.
• An academic support system to help assure their
  success.
• A cohort system for social and cultural support.
• Booker T. Dubois Role Model Program
• Schools can provide a time and space for Black
  and Latino males from a variety of professions to
  speak to and mentor students.
• Identify outside organizations and businesses to
  work with the schools in regards to a
  mentor/tutor program.

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Understand your students

• Culture
• Learning Strategies

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Is this the Ideal student?

• Quiet
• Can sit still for a long period of time
• Works independently
• Long attention span
• Likes ditto sheets
• Left- brain learner
• Passive
• Teacher pleaser
• Mastered reading before second grade
• Neat
• Well developed fine motor skills
• Well organized
• Likes multiple choice exams
• Mature
• White
• Female
• Middle-class
• Two parent home

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Post- Traumatic Slavery Disorder

• Is there a correlation between internalized
  racism (self hate) and black on black violence?
• If so, how are schools as institutions
  perpetuating a white is right and or white is
  the norm culture?

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Hip Hop VOCAB Can you identify at least five of
these words?

• Bling Bling
• Audi
• 1812
• Benjamins
• Buggin
• Crew
• Five finger discount
• Jack
• Juice
• Wack

• Glory
• Jimmy Hat
• Of the hook
• Crash
• Dog
• Frontin
• Ill or illin
• Forcin
• Step off
• Up North

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Hip Hop Rankin or the Dozens

• Yo mama so fat when she has wants someone to
  shake her hand, she has to give directions!
  Oh ok
• Yo mama so fat she got to iron her pants on the
  driveway
• Yo mama so stupid that she tried to put MM's in
  alphabetical order!

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Hip Hop Nword

• Latin word for Black.
• Used during slavery and Jim Crow by whites to
  insult African Americans.
• Adults have not properly taught history so that
  is why HIP HOP artists use the word.
• Hip Hop has tried to embrace the word as a term
  of endearment.

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Hip Hop Nword

• You know enough about the word to stop those
  outside of the race from using it!
• You use it to refer to people you dont like,
  which is the same way white people used it 200
  years ago.

• Questions
• When people outside of the black race use the
  word, why do they feel comfortable enough to use
  it?
• Do you think you have the right to use it?
• Should you use the word in front of your elders?

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Program Breakdown in Schools
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17
41
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Staff Training

• Role Play Exercises
• Black Intelligence Tests/Teacher Opinion Survey
• As a staff, discuss and cultivate the strategies
  of a Master Teacher
• Reflect on personal beliefs versus your own
  practices
• Books to read Black Students Middle Class
  Teachers and Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys
  (Vols. I-IV)
• Characteristics of at Risk Schools
• Develop a Fourth Grade Intervention Team
• Discuss solutions

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What is a Master Teacher?

• Knowledgeable about subject matter
• Provides congruent lessons plans between pedagogy
  and learning styles using written, oral,
  pictures, artifacts, and fine arts
• Bonds, motivates, enhances self-esteem, listens
  to students and is in close proximity to all
  students
• Décor of classroom is inspirational and
  culturally reinforcing.
• High level of self-respect therefore, students
  are not distracting or sleeping.
• High expectations transcending race, income,
  gender, and appearance.
• Equitable response opportunities for all
  students.

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What is a Master Teacher

• Maximizes time on task
• Assertive, consistent, complimentary and clearly
  established rules and consequences.
• Provides cooperative learning experiences.
• Attempts to make curriculum relevant, provides
  practical experiences, field trips and role
  models.
• Students ask more questions than the teacher.
• Develops critical thinking skills by asking
  open-ended questions.

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Characteristics of At-Risk Schools

• Ineffective administrators
• Low expectations
• Incongruence between pedagogy and learning styles
• Irrelevant and inaccurate curriculum
• Tracking
• Lack of parental involvement and support
• Low student self-esteem and motivation
• Negative peer pressure
• Lack of African-American male teachers and role
  models
• Lack of safety

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Judge the success of your schools based on the
success of your African American and Hispanic
male students.- Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu
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The Mis-education of the Negro

• If you can control a mans thinking you do not
  have to worry about his action. When you
  determine what a man shall think you do not have
  to concern yourself about what he will do. If you
  make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not
  have to compel him to accept an inferior status,
  for he will seek it himself. If you make a man
  think that he is justly an outcast, you do not
  have to order him to the back door. He will go
  without being told and if there is no back door,
  his very nature will demand one.
• Dr. Carter G. Woodson

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Critical Points

• Understand your students
• Culture
• Learning styles
• Raising expectations for every student
• All students graduate at college entry level
• Exposure to positive male role models

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Resources

• https//www.education.umd.edu/institutesandcenters
  /MIMAUE/
• Hip Hop Street Curriculum Author Dr. Juwanza
  Kunjufu