How do we close the achievement gap in African American Adolescents?

IN490 –Integrative Studies Capstone – fall 2010Twin Cities CampusTimothy R. Warren

Cultural DiscontinuityIn too many Schools Students are in effect required to leave their family and cultural backgrounds at the schoolhouse door and live in a kind of “Hybrid culture” composed of the community of fellow learners.

(Au and Kawakami 1991)

Curriculum

• Create culturally relevant curriculum for all students in the classroom.

• Use current trends and ideologies to your advantage in terms of lesson plans.

The Education system must adapt to meet the needs of the child rather than forcing the child to meet the needs of the system.

(Murnane & Levy, 1996)

Education: Blooms Taxonomy1. Knowledge: arrange, define,

duplicate, label, list, memorize, name, order, recognize, relate, recall, repeat, reproduce state.

2. Comprehension: classify, describe, discuss, explain, express, identify, indicate, locate, recognize, report, restate, review, select, translate.

3. Application: apply choose, demonstrate, dramatize, employ, illustrate, write.

4. Analysis: analyze, appraise, calculate, categorize, compare, contrast, criticize, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish.

5. Synthesis: arrange, assemble, collect, compose, construct, create, design, set up, write.

6. Evaluation: appraise, argue, assess, value ,evaluate.

Psychology:Maslow’s Hierarchy of needsMaslow has set up a hierarchy of five levels of basic needs. Beyond these needs, higher levels of needs exist. These include needs for understanding, esthetic appreciation and purely spiritual needs. In the levels of the five basic needs, the person does not feel the second need until the demands of the first have been satisfied, nor the third until the second has been satisfied, and so on.

Educational Psychology:The transformation of the person through the experience

The Learner is more than a cognitive machine. The learner is a whole person made up of the mind and the body and comes to a

learning situation with a history, a biography that interacts in individual ways with experience that generates the nature of the

learning.

Closing the Achievement

gap requires the integration of all three

sciences.

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, fore 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