In the present study we explored how culture affects the learning experiences of students in a mathematics classroom. The first author, an African American male, taught a class composed solely of two Asian and 15 White students. During this two-week statistics course, students were asked to engage in a "per-formative" assessment that was…

This article argues that the South African research community could benefit by engaging in more collaborative partnerships within the African continent in relation to community engagement. This argument relates to literature in South Africa concerning an Africanised notion of service learning (SL) and community engagement (CE), university…

The higher education system in Africa and South Africa in particular, is still too academic and distant from the developmental challenges of African local communities. The integration of African indigenous knowledge systems (AIKS) into the higher educational system could improve its relevance. This is due to the holistic, community-based nature…

Resilience, or adaptive behavior in the face of adversity, has recently come to be understood as a phenomenon that should not be uniformly conceptualized across contexts and cultures. This emerging understanding has urged exploration of what resilience might mean in specific cultural contexts. As in other majority nation contexts, there is scant…

Chinua Achebe in his novel "Things Fall Apart" gives us a unique picture of life in Africa before the arrival of Christianity and colonization and the era afterwards. He shows how African people lost their traditional culture and values, replacing them with foreign beliefs. In this article, the way black people lived before the arrival…

Part of the fourth-grade curriculum in the author's district is the creation of a self-portrait. This is always a challenge for both the students and the author, because it is so difficult for beginners to draw a satisfying drawing of a face, whether it is their own or someone else's. In the past the author tried many formats and materials to…

We review recent developments in the study of culture and personality measurement. Three approaches are described: an etic approach that focuses on establishing measurement equivalence in imported measures of personality, an emic (indigenous) approach that studies personality in specific cultures, and a combined emic-etic approach to personality.…

This paper examines the teaching and learning of traditional dance at primary school level in Zimbabwe as a key aspect of postcolonial curriculum reimagination within the broader project of reclaiming a nation's heritage. The paper used the survey design to determine how a cohort of primary school teachers understood traditional dance and how they…

The underrepresentation of girls in schools is a serious problem in many parts of the world and a serious one in Africa especially. In the wake of today's occurrences among them women becoming breadwinners because of incidences like divorce, education of girls is being considered equally important in any society in order to make them self-reliant.…

This study, conducted in June 2014 in Kampala, Uganda, is a follow-up to a similar study conducted in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2008. The basic research question addressed is: "What are the experiences in the lives of upper elementary-aged Ugandan children that foster an intrinsic motivation to seek information?" A secondary…

This study describes the use of literacy--including the written word--in the maintenance and practice of Lukumí, a Diasporic African spiritual tradition. While Lukumí is decidedly orally transmitted, the written word is still a critical part of its contemporary practice. Relying on data collected during participant observation of ceremonies and…

Every aspect of a community's life and values in indigenous Africa provide the theoretical framework for education. The holistic worldview of the traditional system places a strong emphasis on the centrality of the human element and orature in the symmetrical relationship between life and learning. This article focuses on proverbs and the words…

Food access for Maine's growing African refugee population reflects multiple levels of general access to society. To better understand the challenges and opportunities unique to this community, a multidisciplinary team of students, faculty, and community partners integrated the expertise of local residents with the results of a food assessment of…

This study examines how and why peoples of African descent access and utilize community-based pedagogical spaces that exist outside schools. Employing a theoretical framework that fuses historical methodology and border-crossing theory, the researchers review existing scholarship and primary documents to present an historical examination of how…

In East Africa, no other country has witnessed as great a surge in university institutions as Kenya. The intent of this paper is to explore the persistence of the ethnic configurations in the surge of higher education in Kenya, within the context of the country's history. Outlining the major flashpoints in the country's history will be…