Umoja

1. Students Are Our Highest Priority
2. Touching the Spirit - using a holistic approach to reach each student
3. Building Community
4. Connections to the African Diaspora
5. Ethic of Love
6. Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Practices
7. Ritual

 In Umoja, we deeply value intentional purposefulness. We should know why we do what we do; nothing should be random. This does not mean that learning and teaching are pre-determined, illegal, or pre-scripted. We claim here that we must raise our capacity to be intentional while creating “live learning” spaces and programs. Doing so helps our faculty engage in a conscious dialogue informing their practice and choices. It helps us engender a similar conscious dialogue about their practice and choices in our students.

 How does the student repro-duce what you do in class with their friends, family, and community? Students should be able to put into practice what they're learning in your class. They should intentionally bring their learning into the community and share it with family, folks who support them, and friends who could benefit from and be enlightened by the Umoja consciousness. The practice of manifesting intends to ensure that all of what we do in our programs is applied, connected, and relevant to the student's lives and that the learning manifests inside a student's identity—spirit and mind. The question: "How is this manifesting in a way that is helping them survive in their daily lives?"– is part of the consciousness of all Umoja practitioners and, in turn, a part of our students' consciousness so they can take their learning with them outside our campuses.

 To say “What Is Really Going On Here,” a learning environment should always be open, respectful, and playful; there should be argument, dissection, and revision. It should be personal, political, and philosophical. The porch can often be candid and sometimes even painful. Storytelling is privileged, and sometimes, a song breaks out. Porchtalk invites humor, noise, and sometimes unruliness. A classroom with such honesty and visibility can produce frustration and also acceptance. Trust is at the foundation of a porchtalk learning environment, and trust has to be earned, modeled, practiced, openly reflected upon, and revisited. Porchtalk is intentional; for example, the instructor looks for an opportunity to draw out, celebrate, and dignify the quieter students so all the voices in the room make up the porch. The porch is where our students safely communicate and advocate for themselves.

 When we recognize and validate the language that our students bring to the classroom—that which they create amongst themselves—our students open up to the power of language. We can help them develop a sense of pride, ownership, and responsibility in their speaking and writing. By doing so, we can bring our students into the conscious experience of wielding language—academic, standard, Black English, theoretical. Our classrooms can be a multilingual experience that provides an impetus for our students to represent themselves while crossing bridges into other unfamiliar languages they are bound to encounter. When our students experience language as power, curiosity, playfulness, and agency, they replace what might have been standoffishness and uncertainty.

Umoja students are interconnected with African people around the globe. Umoja practitioners can facilitate an awareness of how students’ actions impact all African people. This practice intentionally traces the historical, political, and cultural lines emerging from Africa. This practice encourages a global African consciousness to foster collective responsibility, empathy, and self-awareness. This practice also actively asks that students join their voices and stories with the voices and stories of people across the diaspora. In this way, Umoja students will become aware of the diaspora and articulate their place in that experience.

 Most of our students begin community college in basic skills courses, and like many students, they often do not make it to transfer-level English and Math. So often, our students are taught from a deficit perspective; Umoja flips this and engages students from a capacity perspective. One way acceleration has been talked about is as a shorter pathway through sequences, moving students more quickly through basic skills to transfer-level courses—of course, shortening sequences, when it makes sense, matters. Many Umoja instructors are working with new accelerated curriculum expressions. The Umoja Community recognizes that faculty must design and own the curriculum they offer students and that local authorship and expression are fundamental to the success of accelerated curriculum redesign. Umoja encourages “deep acceleration,” where faculty go beyond structural changes into questions of pedagogy, practice, student capacity, and current theories around adult learning. Furthermore, Umoja asserts that counselors are integral to the success of any innovative curriculum and pathway offered to students.

 Studying in the Village—a dedicated, welcoming Umoja space where students study and spend time together—builds community and nurtures academic success. Designed by students and staff, the Umoja village is a sacred space that offers opportunities to increase exposure to historical and cultural experiences from the African diaspora. The Umoja village expresses and celebrates our students’ voices and models for how students can approach their homework. Encouraging, even requiring, studying on campus works well with our students because it models, practices, and affirms sustained and effective study habits for our students. We must positively and actively foster studying, deep concentration, and creativity for our students to be successful in their academic pursuits.

 Umoja Community programs use their infrastructure, resources, and community as a model for Black achievement across the campus, state, and nation. The absence of ideas regarding Black student success calls us out to participate actively and openly in the analysis and decision-making about how to reverse the tide. We share awareness with our students of their shoulders being leaned upon by their brothers and sisters, their mothers and fathers, and many others. Our students, as leaders, are trained and empowered to engage faculty, administrators, and staff alongside and on behalf of their peers to voice their desire to achieve their educational dreams and goals. Our students, as leaders, are empowered to partner with faculty in the spirit of dual commitment-" I commit to you, you commit to me." When we embrace our position, Umoja becomes more than a program; it is a privilege that will be leveraged. It is a power base from which action and commitment to success for historically under-resourced students and others.

Sharing what we learn honors and extends learning. Umoja students become teachers and pass on wisdom as they gift their learning to their family, community, and peers in the program and at Umoja events. Preparing the gift of knowledge by collectively identifying what is most meaningful, what is necessary, and why this learning gift matters is an act of grace that helps us become accountable to each other's collected live intelligence for purposes that uplift the community. Umoja practitioners believe knowledge and practice are communal and meant to be freely gifted. When we give a learning gift, we become conscious and thoughtful about belonging to each other's achievement; our students become one thousand broad and ten thousand deep.

 When practitioners move with an ethic of love, they touch their students’ spirits. Moving with an ethic of love means sharing ourselves, our stories, our lives, and our experiences to humanize and make the classroom real. This leveraging of the affective–emotion, trust, hope, trauma, healing–moves the discourse deliberately as an inroad to the cognitive domain.

 Umoja counseling is intentional. It transcends the school environment and helps to empower students to make positive changes in their lives and the lives of their communities. We seek out the student, not waiting, immediately exploring what is going on with our students. Seeking out our students and not waiting holds them close and keeps them in school, believing in themselves, each other, and the Umoja program. To do best by our students, accuracy and wisdom matter. Umoja counseling has no walls or time clock; dialogue is open and responsive, based on building relationships. There is a communal dimension to Umoja counseling.

 Live learning is risky; it is freewheeling and open. The instructor yields control of meaning and understanding in the classroom while keeping a keen eye on learning as it is emerging. Live learning implies that the learning experience is generative and performative. The exact content and learning experience are known after the class session begins in a live learning situation. Surprise and original language burst out all over the classroom; the instructor facilitated and culled the learning. Live learning intentionally captures and documents learning in real time. It is a way of having a discussion that flies while focusing the insight, capturing it on boards and in notebooks so the discussion does not disappear after the students leave the class session. It is democratic and analytically rigorous at the same time. Live learning demonstrates to the students through their words that language is powerful; ideas and texts are rich and can be made their own. Most importantly, live learning indicates to the students that they are intelligent and profound.

 Informed by their distinct history, African Americans have created a unique African diaspora experience expressed through myriad intellectuals, artists, and spiritual leaders. Umoja sees individuals like Phyllis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells Barnett, Robert Johnson, W.E.B. Dubois, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Alan Locke, Thelonious Monk, Malcolm X, Romaire Bearden, Aaron Douglas, Langston Hughes, Ra Un Nefer Amen, Cheikh Anta Diop, bell hooks, and many, many others as ancestral bridges—a way of reaching back while moving forward. The Umoja Community encourages our practitioners to continually mine the work of African Americans in interpreting and constructing knowledge in our classrooms. We invite our students and ourselves to claim this richness that often resides below the surface.

We are:

• A village.
• Acting in accord and unafraid to be seen and heard as we do our work.
• Leveraging every voice and source of information to do our best for our students.

We gather and share information about our students. As Umoja professionals, we feel that including everybody in our distinct disciplines and work duties shares knowledge and builds commitment. In Umoja, a counselor is an English teacher, a Math teacher is in history class, an administrative assistant is a tutor, and everybody is a coordinator. We know what each other is up to in an intimate, detailed way so that we can support and reinforce each other. We cover and pitch in on each other's work, even while maintaining our areas of expertise. When a program event or program need comes up, we all inquire and support. And particularly when it comes to our students, we all stay aware of their progress, challenges, crises, and successes.