When preparing to teach Advanced Placement African American Studies for the first time, I pondered how to introduce my students to the many primary sources featured in the College Board’s curriculum for the course.
Many of the various thinking routines I considered—such as “See, Think, Wonder,” which I had previously applied successfully in my sophomore English classes—seemed too simplistic for my purposes.
I needed a protocol that could guide my students in excavating truths from an array of visual and textual sources, from paintings and diagrams to poetry and prose. This framework needed to scaffold student learning without compromising agency, and it needed to stretch my students’ thinking while also building their confidence.
Relying on constructive input from six other educators across the country, I drafted and refined a thinking routine that I call the Sankofa Framework, named for one of the visual signifiers that the Akan people in West Africa use to represent philosophical guidance or inherited wisdom.
In doing so, I was attempting to ground the framework in Afrocentricity, scholar Molefi Kete Asante’s theoretical approach that elevates African history, culture, and identity in shaping Black studies.
Represented through the image of a mythical bird looking backward while holding an egg, sankofa is a compound word in the Twi language of Ghana that means “go back and fetch it,” communicating the importance of returning to the truths of the past to inform how we shape the future. This concept gives my students a blueprint for fetching truths from Black history when grappling with a vast assortment of complex sources.
While this framework was designed with my students in AP African American Studies in mind, it can be adopted for any course that features primary-source material from Black history, including ethnic studies, English, history, or other humanities classes.
My students begin applying the Sankofa Framework by situating a primary source in its historical context. Key questions students address during this step include: Who or what is depicted within this source? Where and when was this source created? Who is the creator or author? Who is the audience? What additional context surrounds this source?
Next, students will go deep to wrestle with the historical knowledge of the source as it relates to Black history. Here, students dig into the following prompts: What knowledge does this source communicate about Black history? What claim to knowledge can you make through this source?
At this point within the source protocol, my students will consider any omissions or obfuscations. Through this step, students will consider the following questions: Whose voices or perspectives are omitted, or missing, from this source? Whose voices or perspectives are intentionally obfuscated, or hidden, through this source? What additional viewpoints might deepen our understanding of this source?
Lastly, students take this knowledge from the past into the future, with an emphasis on feelings. Students will sit with the following question: What feelings are expressed or provoked through this source that could promote social change? Through this step, students are encouraged to consider their own perspectives or perspectives of people in the past.
These guiding questions immerse my students in Afrocentric ways of knowing by borrowing rhythms from the Black intellectual tradition. As the late African American studies scholar Manning Marable has explained, Black studies has long been descriptive (describing Black life and history in nuanced detail), corrective (correcting racist stereotypes about Black culture and Eurocentric standards of beauty), and prescriptive (prescribing tactics that might lead to social transformation).
By situating the historical context of a source, students are engaging with the descriptive nature. Through wrestling with the historical knowledge, they are correcting Eurocentric erasure of Black history. In considering the emotional impact of a source, students reach for the potential of Black studies to provoke social transformation.
When my students were asked in their first (anonymous) end-of-unit reflection which assignments, projects, processes, or approaches stood out as particularly valuable or meaningful, I was surprised to find that the Sankofa Framework was the most frequent response. As one student shared recently during a class discussion, the framework offers students an “easy” structure for “challenging” thinking.
Kofi Anyidoho, the Ghanaian poet and literary scholar, describes the Akan depiction of Sankofa as a bird that is “constantly reaching back into the past even as it flies sky-bound into a future of great expectations, mindful always that an incautious leap into the future could easily lead to a sudden collapse of dreams.” Not unlike that proverbial bird, any student in pursuit of a Black history education must reach into the past for a new vision. This framework just might help students take flight into that future.
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