This year’s spring-break destination: Belize.
But it wasn’t just for snorkeling or touring Mayan ruins. The two dozen students on the academic expedition had just finished a course called African and Native American Peoples in Belize and Beyond, where they learned about the 18th-century shipwrecked Nigerians and West Africans who intermarried with so-called “yellow Caribes,” lost pitched battles to the British and were exiled to Central America’s Mosquito Coast.
“For so many students, their conception of black culture is what they see on TV,” says linguistics professor John Rickford. “We want them to have a conception of the diversity and richness of black people the world over—to take them out of their Stanford seats and into the larger world, and set their imaginations working.”
And so Rickford has been captaining what he likes to call “journeys in search of knowledge” since 1998, when he became chair of the African and African American Studies (AAAS) program. With dozens of AAAS majors and minors, he has visited the isolated Gullah-speaking peoples of South Carolina’s Sea Islands and trekked to remote mountain settlements in Jamaica—all with a nod to the late professor St. Clair Drake, an anthropologist who traveled to Africa in the 1960s and co-founded the Stanford program in 1969, in response to student demands. “He saw in Africa a link not just with past history, but with nations that were coming into being, searching for their own identities, conquering their own destinies,” Rickford says.
Today’s program graduates about a dozen students each year; hundreds more enroll in its courses. Recently named one of five “highly regarded” black-studies programs in the nation by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, AAAS has diverged from the focus on history and literature that is typical at many schools. Instead, says Rickford, it aims to stake out a “broader view,” drawing on the expertise of faculty in psychology, linguistics and law.
The broad scope of the program raises a dilemma: “How applied should [the program] be?” Rickford asks. “It’s fine to go back and learn about ancient African civilizations, but all around us, students are failing [school] at significant rates and communities are plagued with problems of police persecution and drugs. So to what extent should we be addressing issues of practical concern in education and criminal justice and political representation?”
To consider those and other questions, Stanford hosted a daylong pedagogy workshop in late April for faculty from more than a dozen campuses. “We saw it as a real roll-up-your-sleeves workshop,” Rickford says. “It was all, ‘What books do you use? What problems do you have? What works best and what bombs completely?’ ”
Spring-break learning expeditions, it appears, work quite well.
