Curriculum

SACS will offer a curriculum that sets students on a college preparatory path and that meets or exceeds West Chester Area School District (WCASD) and Pennsylvania Academic Standards.

SACS Education Guide

SACS will also offer a curriculum that raises students’ awareness of their cultural heritage and what they can become which begins a cycle of success. Becoming knowledgeable about one’s self and one’s heritage is empowering and leads to personal commitment and achievement. Developing this cultural consciousness is a strategy which can move vision into reality.

African-Centered

Throughout all curriculum areas, teachers will infuse a system of sequentially planned educational opportunities designed to provide children with the necessary and required skills that will enable them to participate in the global marketplace. The study of history for example, will begin with Africa. In an African centered school, educators must “first place their students on the planet” before history can be made meaningful. Throughout the language arts curriculum, the importance of West African oral, visual, musical, and festival traditions of the Mande, Hausa, and Yoruba peoples will be regularly studied, appreciated and performed. The rich literatures of the African Diaspora across the world will be focused on as well. As students study mathematics, science and technology, they will be consistently reminded of the important roles played by Africa and Africans in the development of these important branches of human learning.

Several sources will be used, including biographies of Benjamin Banneker, Guion Bluford, Dr. Mae Jemison, Elijah McCoy, Norbert Rillieux, or the Strategies for Teaching Science to African American Students provided by the Department of Education at West Virginia University at http://www.as.wvu.edu/~equity/african.html.

SACS African centered curriculum recognizes that an Afro-centric approach to life cannot be incorporated into one’s existence in isolation from the universal human experience. People are more likely to understand their personal group and group circumstances when they realize that those circumstances are tied to and fit into universal patterns of human behavior. Many scholars have argued that children learn at different rates and that they learn 92% of what they do and much less of what they are told; therefore, our African-centered curriculum utilizes the concept of “learning by doing,” an approach that is consistent with the learning styles of our youth.

SACS Education Guide

To help students fully understand and place their personal and group circumstances within a global context, our lessons will be centered on the following important concepts:

• Maafa, “disaster”

• Sba, “teaching,” “wisdom,” and “study.”

• Sia, “insight”

• Sankofa, an Akan word that means “go back and fetch it.”

• Mdw ntr, “divine word”

• Mdw nfr, “good speech” or “the beautiful word”

• Whmy msw, “deep thought,” reawakening,”

• Heka, “power”

We believe that these concepts and the culturally appropriate instructional approaches will allow learners to fit their personal experiences into patterns of universal human behavior and will relate their conscious frame of reference, provide opportunities for teachers and students to be creative in both learning and teaching, recognize the connections between and among all things and all people, and provide learners with frameworks for understanding future problems that may confront them both in and outside the classroom.