Abstract
The achievement gap between low-income African-American children and their white counterparts is considerable in grades three, four, and five. In the low-income, urban regions of the Sacramento area, this gap is considerable; white school-aged students in grades three through five, achieve up to nineteen percent and twenty-three percent higher on standardized literacy assessments, respectively. The English Language Arts/California Standards Test (ELA CST) scores for African-American and White students in the school district for which I work, show twenty-four percent of African-American third grade students at the Proficient or Advanced level in ELA as compared to fifty-five percent of White third grade students. Marginalized Knowledge is a form of curriculum that includes selected “multicultural” content that alters the historical and social authenticity people actually experienced. “The ideology of pluralism in California’s History/Social Science Framework (California State Department of Education 1987) and state-adopted textbooks illustrate this kind of Marginalized Knowledge in the transformation of a curriculum” (King, 1995, p. 274). The curriculum essentially marginalizes the actual experiences of African-Americans and the roles they played in the development of American society. Marginalized Knowledge is also found in the ELA curriculum. The majority of the stories focus on a White, Anglo-European culture with White, Anglo-European characters. This curriculum further promotes the achievement gap between African-American children and their White counterparts. This project is a series of ELA curriculum workshop stations designed for cooperative grouping situations. The goal is to increase third grade comprehension and knowledge of ELA by building cultural capital for students. This project is designed to help teachers explore cooperative grouping in their classroom in hopes to aid the teacher in the Human Relations approach, which is geared toward building self-esteem, eliminating stereotypes, and promoting self-esteem through positive interaction. The cooperative grouping will focus on Afrocentric Pedagogy, and the lessons are based on the Harambee work ethic. The content of these cooperative-grouping lessons are based on African-American history and African-American folktales. The comprehension passages were selected for the purpose of establishing cultural capital for students. The curriculum will tap into the student’s prior knowledge and it will relate the subject matter to the student’s collective memory.