Sankofa pedagogy: redefining rural educational success through school–community cultural synergy in Africa

Culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) has become an emerging strategy for improving the learning outcomes of historically marginalised children. Its applicability in decolonising education within African, historically colonised and multicultural contexts, however, is a developing field. This article presents findings from a Ghanaian rural basic school. Educators, teachers, students, and community participants are engaged to qualitatively investigate strategies for co-creating CRP to decolonise education outcomes for rural communities. Data collection entailed interviews with the school principal and a community leader, focus group discussions with teachers and adult household members, a community meeting discussion, teachers’ reflective essay, fieldnotes, student assignment and documents. Using a grounded theory approach, with multiple cycles of inductive coding of data themes, sensitising concepts emerged. Findings revealed that school–community cultural synergy can leverage students’ home cultural assets as learning resources, thus connecting schooling and community needs to offer affordances for decolonising curriculum in Africa through CRP. This article argues for a deeper engagement with collaborative school cultures that empower community education stakeholders to retrieve – “Sankofa” – and integrate the African traditionally-valued collectivist ways of learning into school through greater blending of home and school cultural capital.