Kufundisha: An Innovative Teaching Approach for Student Engagement and Experiential Learning

This article examines an undergraduate Africana Studies course on Black men in contemporary times at a public institution in California, with the majority (74%) of the students identified as Black or African American. Concepts of Kufundisha (Neville & Cha-Jua, 1998) were employed to create a co-...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	The Journal of Pan African studies 2016-10, Vol.9 (8), p.84-101
Main Author:	Hackett, Cedric D
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	African American college students African Americans Black studies Blacks College students, Black College teaching Community colleges Innovations Learning Social aspects Study and teaching Teaching Teaching methods
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	This article examines an undergraduate Africana Studies course on Black men in contemporary times at a public institution in California, with the majority (74%) of the students identified as Black or African American. Concepts of Kufundisha (Neville & Cha-Jua, 1998) were employed to create a co-curricular field-exercise called the "Men of Color Enquiry & Student Research Poster Session." The poster session is an instructional practice that fosters intellectual investigation, discovery, and critical thinking skills of participants. Student groups develop a research question or hypothesis relevant to the course content. The research posters provide a means for communicating background information, methods, frameworks, and discussion of a topic of collective interest, while focusing on the specifics of the investigation results (Newbrey & Baltezore, 2006). As a culturally responsive teaching model used in Black studies, Kufundisha allows a professor to observe the collective categories of learners in order to support and encourage students to explore their social experiences in ways that are racially inspiring and liberating. This model also encourages the construction of an emancipatory educational setting which permits students to become actively engaged in their own learning process. Applicable components of the model, the student poster assignment and evaluation, and student reflections are discussed. Keywords: Kufundisha, Culturally Relevant Teaching, African Centered, Black Studies Pedagogy.
ISSN:	0888-6601 1942-6569