Category Archives: AfroVisualizations, Black Aesthetics, and Beauty

AfroDigital Consciousness (ADC): Definitions and Callings

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Last week, at this time, I was with teachers, parents, and activists at ABEC (A Black Education Congress) who collectively offered a vision for what it means to live and be in AfroDigital spaces. This week, I am thinking about those conversations more deeply, understanding the ways that  I am accountable to a history and set of ideals for education (and technology) that go far, far beyond the scope and imaginations of the schools where I work.

ADC PosterAfroDigital Consciousness (ADC) was a term that I thought was brilliantly defined at ABEC and captures exactly the kind of ideal that goes beyond what schools intend for us.  ADC= SPIRIT+ COMMUNITY+ TECHNOLOGY (“Ego-Tripping 2.0″ is an interconnected notion inspired by the opening performance at ABEC that included a reading of Nikki Giovanni’s “Ego-Tripping.”)  ADC is multi-sensory oriented and steps into our practice and spirit. ADC creates community instead of destroying it. ADC means you play the game better… because you are on another level. 

Perhaps, one of my favorite moments was the emphatic declaration that ADC goes beyond what students of color most commonly receive in schools: a MINIMAL COMPETENCY, SKILLS-BASED apparatus.  We ask: what spirits have our ancestors left or what is the knowledge that can propel us forward in a culturally relevant way? ADC recognizes that technology is power and power is defining your own reality (see Dr. Akbar’s work here).  

When we talk about ADC, we are fundamentally talking about IDEAS. AfroDigital Ideas offer a Pan African vision, work globally, and represent an uncensored bearing of an African American/global perspective. AfroDigital Ideas preserve our history, culture, and arts and RESTORE our culture.  In particular, ADC directs a new vision of teaching:

  • Children CAN code and design; they can do it if provided the opportunity
  • Students need to be provided the opportunity to use their creativity and develop that capacity
  • We must tell the story and history of ourselves and our ancestors utilizing technology

We even talked about an AfroDigital Universe that is non-intimidating, user-friendly, AND economically freeing apps, websites, and digital experiences and includes (but is not limited to):

  • An app for health & beauty for African/African Americans that promotes natural beauty for young, impressionable girls
  • Mental health apps that will deal with: bullying, depressions, schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder (these resources will be linked to help black families receive authentic, genuine assistance)
  • An online search engine geared towards our African culture
  • An online African/African American company where all groups can create, edit, and publish books on various cultures.  This includes illustrators who have access to spaces where they can upload their art
  • An online African-centered virtual school that is developmentally friendly
  • A digital archive of our lesson plans and best practices as a resource for teachers that is community-informing
  • Online examples of a Hip Hop based education for teaching
  • A gaming platform/experience that takes you back to Kemet (with Baba Asa Hilliard as guide/avatar)
  • Kwanzaa principles that are digitally lived and offer self-love
  • Resources-focused search capabilities that access resources across the Diaspora

Of course, these apps and technologies will not be developed overnight.  That’s not the point here.  It’s about the ideological apparatus behind what we do, how and why.  And, for me, it’s about always remembering that fundamental UNDERSTANDING:  we are accountable to a history and set of ideals for education (and technology) that go far, far beyond the scope and imaginations of the schools where we often work and the dominant systems of education that enroll many of us.

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A Black Education Congress (ABEC)

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Please Click Here for ABEC website.

Please Click Here for ABEC website.

I originally intended to stop/ write/ reflect for each of my past three days at the Black Education Congress.  Yes, that was certainly the intention.  But this language and this written form of the Word just got in the way.  There were so many moments that touched me.  I wouldn’t be able to define and chronicle those moments linearly even if I wanted to.  This morning, I am left with one resonance that I am carrying with me.  I expect new resonances to fill me in coming days and weeks so I will keep that discussion going here.

I realize today the weight of an experience that I seldom receive, an experience that maybe I have never had… being in a room filled with concentric circles, nested cyphers, filled with people of Afrikan descent who have the education and well-being of Black children first and foremost in their heart, mind, spirit.  Just imagine it!  It might sound simple, but how many times have you actually experienced THAT? I needed to stop today and realize that I am never in such a space and to also realize what that space-powerfulness has given me.  I don’t mean the folk who are trying to usher black children into a middle class pseudo-bourgeoisie (I say pseudo because middle-classness means something completely different in this time, even though most folk don’t realize that.)  I don’t mean THEM folk.  These days I feel lucky if I can find a set of black colleagues, scattered across the country, who have a dynamic, critical vision for Black Education.  And I am lucky if have a sista across campus who I can meet after our classes are over and just talk.  Like I said… L-U-C-K-Y!  I had them sistas-in-the-wings at Rutgers-Newark, for instance (given the history and spirit of Newark), but you had to sustain a whole lotta foolishness in your department first. And while I attend professional conferences and panels where I do meet such soul-sustaining folk, more often than not, most black folk are busy trying to be famous and/or network so that they can become famous.  That’s the culture in which black youth must survive a hostile education and it is the culture in which we most often must fight to help them not merely survive but thrive.

I am thinking back to the opening night with the procession of elders punctuated by the opening words of Dr. Adelaide Sanford.  This is what I mean by these words not allowing the weight and fullness of a Black Experience.  Here is a video of the Queen Mother from a July 2013 talk in Philly:

As powerful as this video is, it does not begin to capture what it was like to be in that room that night at a circle with other black teachers and high school students (who were ENRAPTURED, by the way, of course!)  And as powerful as this video is, it does not capture what it is like to be in Dr. Adelaide Sanford’s presence with black educators at your side. It is THAT feeling that I am carrying with me today and that I now take with me as I educate young people of color.

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CSS, Color, Design & Lab-Pedagogies

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Youth workshop in a college computer lab.

Youth workshop in a college computer lab.

For the first time in my teaching career, I have access to a computer lab.  It simply was never possible before.  My classes will only visit the lab three times in the semester (beginning, middle, and end) for design-work but I am just now incorporating this into my pedagogy.  I am embarrassed to admit that this is the first time that I am understanding how significant the changes in pedagogy are based on the lay-out of a computer lab.  I have read about these issues, for sure, but honestly, I ain’t read all that stuff closely.  What I need to think about all of this for when my students’ university-supplied laptops die at the second year?  Or what if we ain’t got no labs?  Those texts didn’t relate to me and maybe I was hatin a little bit on them folks with resources.  I shoulda been listening though.

So here is what I have worked with:

  1. classrooms where all students have a laptop that they bring to class with them
  2. a large lab with long rows and computer-station/screen at front
  3. a medium-sized lab with concentric squares and computer-station/screen at front
  4. a small lab with desks with the computer-station at the back of the room and the screen at front
  5. no tech at all (very few students have laptops, there are no labs, and there is a long waitlist for a classroom with computer and screen).

By far, I like #4 the best though that spy-cam stuff could give the same effect (where you see what each student is doing on their computer screen on your own screen).  I also like #1 for everyday classroom activities but when you are doing design or  introducing CSS, there’s just something about those large, television-sized screens that really offer a unique dynamism.

Your whole body movements shift in these labs.  For #1, you are sitting at small group tables with students.  For #2, you are pacing rows after you demo some design issue but you can walk to the back of the room and get a sweeping, panoramic view of what everyone is doing.  For #3, you are circling rows after you demo some design issue (there is no room at the back so you never get the panorama).  For #4, you are hidden from view, only your design elements are visible to students.  You offer highly individualized instruction because you can see what your students are struggling and hesitating with as you look on their screens during your demo.  Each room lay-out offers different possibilities that I now need to think about before I select the lab location.

Click here to go to this digital interview.

Click here to go to this digital interview.

All in all, my students’ CSS design so far is impressive.  They still have some work to do and I did not teach things like left navigation hovering (I barely understand it myself), but all is good.  There are ironies though.  For the first time that I have this much ability to design my e-pedagogies, design is not really valued as composing, literacy, or thinking in the 21st century here.  There are more ironies.  I have many colleagues across the country where ePortfolios are mandated or saturated across the curriculum who often complain to me, quite bitterly at times, at how unthoughtful and uncritical their students’ visual design is.  On the contrary, I asked my students to think of what they want to convey— just with color— in the context of a course that makes culturally relevant pedagogy central, and they soared with flying colors on that (pun intended).  But hardly no one around them seems to see or value that as literate behavior or 21st century composing.  It’s a damn shame.  I’m not worried about students though because they are entering a digital world with a whole different set of expectations and requirements than the digitally-illiterate folk who marginalize them.  To my students: keep flyin high.  I see you!

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Decolonization, ePortfolios, and Students of Color

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Though I have had some reservations about ePortfolios, I am more turned off by the ways ePorts get used rather than with the actual ePortfolio technologies available.  These platforms are already pre-packaged and pre-formatted so I am deeply disturbed when faculty create a master template where students (or staff) just input data.  It amazes me that ePortfolios can become just another 5-paragraph formula so quickly.   Here is what I mean by a template:

Screen Shot 2013-10-02 at 11.10.11 PM

The box wrapped in a gray line is called the top navigation bar of an ePortfolio.  You click on a word/item and then you get a series of corresponding ePages that have another series of left navigation options.  What happens in many of the classrooms that I see is that teachers set the topics of the navigation bar to match the requirements of the department, state standards, etc.  Students just load in their work, almost like sifting recyclables into the correct bin.  While that kind of automated sifting is an important task for one’s daily household chores, it most certainly does not qualify as digital literacy or even LITERACY.  For me, it is simply tragic that this sifting passes mustard for writing classrooms.

This sifting into digital templates is yet another kind of standardization and corporate cloning.  That kind of ePortfolio robs students of even minimal levels of digital design in already pre-formatted platforms.  The technology actually allows you to remove the line around the box, thicken it, shadow-box it, color it, round its ages, make buttons, add a background color, etc.  You can do the same with the left navigation (click here for my own ePort as a sample).  You can have multiple backgrounds in all of these spaces. The examples are so countless that you need an actual design plan.  In fact, most websites start with a sketch, a practice that stirs significant conflict since far too many teachers do not see sketching as composing and writing.  I am always so wonderfully surprised when I hear web designers talk about their design choices in the same way that an interior designer does.  It makes sense since we are, in essence, designing a space.  So if students are not allowed to think about any of these design elements for themselves, then can we really call their work an ePortfolio? I remain stunned that writing teachers do not think design has any part of literacy in the 21st century.  While that fact alone is not shocking, such teaching practices are especially violent for students of color.

The images of smiling, happy students of color are masterfully manipulated in college marketing for every brochure, poster, and college webpage— images that, once again, are not controlled by people of color. The overall saturation of images in a multimedia era has not meant anything positive for people of color.  When you do not control the resources, you certainly do not control how your image is portrayed.  I am talking about decolonization here: what might it mean for people of color to (re)imagine their image inside of  the violence of a visual/media culture that denies them this kind of self-determination?   Self-determined visual cultures will be vital for digital literacies in the 21st century, all the more so given the stunning number of college teachers who use educational technologies to strip students of their own cultural-visual rhetorics.

Giving students control of their own visual image has meant that I have had to introduce a little CSS in my class. It’s not that difficult.  While many of my rather crotchety colleagues might seem to think that the sole focus of college writing in the 21st century is grammar in print texts, I know better than to trust such systems and teachers. I am disappointed by how many remain intent on denying my students the REALEST and most basic of human rights/literacy in the 21st century… self-determination.

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