Approaching critical pedagogies in education

Abstract

We are tempted to start this book with a bold declaration: “Africa is not a country”, or “Africa is more than a single story of starvation and poverty”. In so many ways the Africa many of us hear about in the West is far removed from the continent that Mansa Musa hailed from or that Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka so eloquently writes about. Instead, the West presents a picture of a people in need, a people to be saved, a continent that needs ‘development’ and ‘development workers’: the innumerable partial perspectives that ignore the wealth of cultures, resources, traditions, and knowledges of the African continent and its people. What do we need to know when we work with people from the continent? How do we, as educators, teach about the continent of Africa? What is our relationship with the people, products, and epistemologies of the African continent? Here we present you with some basic facts: Africa is a continent comprising 54 countries, a population of 1.216 billion people, and an estimated 2,000 languages; with a landmass of 30.37 million km2, it is three times the size of Europe. Imagine an Africa that can fit the physical size of Europe into its landmass three times and has twice its human population. From the traditional Mercator maps of the world, it would be hard to conceive of this as a true statement. What other perspective/s have we been fed from a Eurocentric stance? Two decades into the twenty-first century, typical portrayals of ‘Africa’ in the Global North still reflect essentialist thinking in the form of poverty and hardship, disease and hunger. It is this terrain of one-sided truths that have formed the stimulus for these chapters. This book draws together a number of perspectives from educators of African, American and Irish descent living and working in Ireland, who want to question and challenge these fundamental misunderstandings. We come to this project from a range of experiences and professional backgrounds and with the commonality of sharing a vision for a just and more equitable global society. Through the chapters in this volume, we combine our experiences and insights in order to challenge existing educational discourse in Ireland in relation to Africa, which we argue, remains predominantly rooted in deficit perspectives overshadowed by colonial continuities (Heron, 2007). As editors and contributors to this volume,