Dr. Greg Carr's list of the 6 Categories in the curriculum developed in 2005-07:
- Who are African people to each other*? (Social Structure)
- Who are African people to other people*? (Governance)
- What science and technologies** did Africans develop at any moment, to help advance our lives? (Ways of Knowing)
- What ways of knowing*** did we develop, what ways of understanding the world? (Epistemology****)
- As we remember something in our history, how do we pass that memory on through time? (Movement & Memory)
- What did we create in that moment to help us understand*****? (Cultural Meaning Making)
* - Who are we to each other? The central value in African ways of knowing, all over the world, is relationships. Who are you to other people? Whose your mama? Where are you from? Who are your people?
** - What ways did we develop to interact with our material reality and improve our living conditions?
*** - In many African ways of knowing, "lines" symbolize intersections between spiritual forces. You don't cross a line, without a rule. And people say, 'Africans didn't have any rules'. No, our beliefs inform the world's beliefs. (For example, "step on a crack..." or "split a pole...")
**** - Epistemology Definition: the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge (source: britannica.com)
***** - What is it that we created culturally, that is so powerful, that it speaks to the highest of our values? And that's music and art.
Karen: As I'm saying 'Socratic Method', I know he got that from Africa. I know that "question asking" is African. Who's the Socrates of Africa, whose name that we can replace The Socratic Method with? Because from Kant to Socrates, they have given us the heroes and the people that have been purveyors of things that they really weren't.
Dr. Carr: Umberto Eco ("On the Shoulder of Giants") says, 'every generation is really coming out of an argument or relationship, with the generations before it. So what he say's is, when you see these Europeans come into the Enlightenment period, they're arguing with those who came just before them, but in order to win the argument, they skip over that generation and go back and create a Greece and a Rome, to give them a heritage.
Dr. Carr: Umberto Eco ("On the Shoulder of Giants") says, 'every generation is really coming out of an argument or relationship, with the generations before it. So what he say's is, when you see these Europeans come into the Enlightenment period, they're arguing with those who came just before them, but in order to win the argument, they skip over that generation and go back and create a Greece and a Rome, to give them a heritage.
Karen: So who do we replace Socrates with?
Dr. Carr: You can call it, The African Method.
Dr. Carr: You can call it, The African Method.
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