Making Sense of Global Awareness on American College Campuses: Women’s History in the African Tradition

I feel deeply honored and privileged to have been asked to deliver the Keynote Address for this 2019 College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Chair in Humanities Symposium—Global Voices on the University of Dayton Campus. I wish to thank Professor Julius Amin, the Alumni Chair in Humanities for inviting me, and Heidi Hass for making all the arrangements. As I contemplate the challenge before me, I have decided to approach it from a very personal space: to speak to, with the aim of making sense of, my journey into awareness, African awareness—an awareness that materialized out of my desire to decolonize knowledge on, and about, Africa and African women; and how I have transmitted that awareness into my teaching about Global Africa on two American college campuses — the College of William and Mary and now Michigan State University. It is an awareness that developed and found expression at another American college campus: namely, the University of California Los Angeles, the institution from which I earned my master’s and PhD degrees.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/global_voices_2/1003/thumbnail.jp

Constructing College-Level Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Minors—Moving from Performative to Transformative DEI

In a period of growing support as well as hostility toward, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the United States, we developed two college-level DEI minors. We grounded each minor in critical pedagogy, a broad theoretical and philosophical perspective on the purpose and process of education that encapsulates a variety of practices and methods. The goal was to move beyond performative DEI by collaborating with students to develop the necessary tools to become engaged and self-managed citizens both nationally and globally. As such, we embedded dialogue, self-reflection, diverse knowledge networks and sources, and critical frameworks into the minors, as we sought to balance developing critical awareness with working toward change.  In the following paper, we describe these basic elements of critical pedagogy to transformative DEI and link them to the processes of constructing and ultimately delivering the minors. Key examples are provided to demonstrate the implementation of these elements in our work. We conclude with our reflections on how this experience may inform similar efforts

Some Thoughts on a Teacher, Father Figure, and Mentor

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Balancing Male and Female Principles: Teaching About Gender in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

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