Africa is Not a Country!

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

When inner city students have few chances to travel outside of the city, the classroom becomes one of their only opportunities to see the world. Most of my students receive free lunch, and come in with very low skills, including about 30% of our students receiving special education services. Many of their parents never made it through college. In spite of these struggles, my global studies classroom is geared towards getting students to become global citizens, preparing them for college by fostering curiosity in the world around them, and fostering literacy skills such as visual analysis in addition to formal non-fiction reading and writing skills.

Africa is a continent that students have many stereotypes about, and few accurate images of what Africa’s diversity actually looks like. My students are not used to having these stereotypes challenged, and when we read about things that counteract their ideas, it does not always sink in. I have limited resources teaching in a large urban public school, and my students have limited resources and opportunities to see images other than from movies like Madagascar or on the news about starvation and poverty in Africa.

In order to counter this deficiency of knowledge and understanding about Africa’s vast diversity, I hope to provide them with a range of African imagery to make the places we read about feel more real. By incorporating vivid and powerful images of Africa, students will understand that Africa is more than just wild animals, jungles, poverty, and slavery. The photos of George Steinmetz will help students understand that Africa is full of vast diverse urban centers and a range of rural village lifestyles, and geographically diverse with mountains, deserts, rivers, savannas, and coastal plains. The photos of Sebastiao Salgado focuses more on images of people throughout Africa, showing how culturally diverse Africa is with influences from Islam, European colonization, and local peoples. Students will view these books in small groups, developing questions, observing patterns, and making connections to content we learn in class.

It is a crime that my students only have images from popular media that provided a distorted image of Africa. While I provide students with a range of readings from Egypt to Kenya to South Africa to Ghana, vibrant photographs. Your small donations will change the way my students think about Africa for their entire lives.