Furious Flowers: Using Black Arts Inquiry and Pedagogy to Engage Black Males

Abstract

Knowledge and ways of knowing derived from African American history and traditions have typically been marginalized or excluded from the learning landscape of African American students. This essay urges a turn to ways of knowing, valuing, and meaning making based on inquiry and teaching around cultural ideas espoused during the Black Arts Movement (1965-1976). As an alternative paradigm, Black Arts inquiry and pedagogy is presented as a functional extension of African American cultural knowledge and life praxes. The author draws from two sources: (a) the ideological mission undertaken by the cultural architects of the Black Arts Movement and (b) his extensive experience as a teaching artist. Both sources are interpreted and situated as modalities to encourage: (a) critical resistance to ideology and psycho-cultural models imposed by the dominant culture; (b) development of culturally based aesthetic and materialist approaches that make worthwhile use of African American cultural knowledge; (c) culturally-situated curricula to engage the intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities of Black males; and (d) the development of an apprenticeship tradition to appropriately interpret the African American intellectual genealogy to successive generations.