Habari Gani?: How to Create Homeplace in the Classroom through the 7 principles of Kwanzaa
Kwanzaa is often celebrated only 7 days out of the year, but the principles that the holiday is centered around should be implemented into our lives year round. The seven principles are Umoja (Unity), Kujichagulia (Self-Determination), Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility), Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics), Nia (Purpose), Kuumba (Creativity), Imani (Faith). For the culture, we may embody these principles in our personal lives, but Kwanzaa may be able to have a great impact in our professional lives as well.
It is unarguable that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a great shift in education. With the popularization of online learning, many of us yearn the culture that once existed in the physical classroom. To a minimal extent, the classroom culture we now attempt to recreate virtually embodies the idea of ‘homeplace’, or those feelings of safety, nourishment, and respect.
In bell hooks’ “Homeplace (A Site of Resistance)” (1990), hooks explains,
“The tasks of making homeplace [is] about the construction of a safe place where black people could affirm one another by [healing] many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination. We could not learn to love or respect ourselves in the culture of white supremacy, on the outside; it was there on the inside, in that “homeplace,” most often created and kept by black women, that we had the opportunity to grow and develop, to nurture our spirits. Homeplace [is] a community of resistance” (384).
bell hooks argues that historically Black women have been responsible to nurture an environment or homeplace that allows those that are harmed by racial oppression and white supremacy to be loved and respected. In contrast to ‘the outside’, homeplace resists degrading and disrespecting the Black body, mind, and spirit. It is something with a marked entrance, that must be entered and exited. Homeplace is a space that nurtures and promotes safety of the body, growth of the mind, and healing of the spirit.
I will refer to community as the people that occupy homeplace, and homeplace as a space or the site of resistance.
For many educators, class community and homeplace can be naturally present, to a minimal extent, prior to the pandemic, when students and teachers alike nurtured positive relationships during their lunch breaks, study halls, or recesses. Now as we enter the virtual scene, we as educators must actively and consciously work to cultivate community and homeplace. And once we return to the physical space, we can create homeplace more deliberately, and with a purpose.
The seven principles that Kwanzaa is centered around can allow us to build community and homeplace, efficiently and effectively, within our classroom, whether is completely virtual, in-person, or a mixture of both.
Here’s a guide on how to implement the 7 principles of Kwanzaa for community and homeplace in the classroom:
1. Umoja or Unity: To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
Umoja emphasizes the importance of building relationships with those closest to us to form a united front to achieve our common goals. This principle is the foundation of Kwanzaa, as it is incorporated into the following 6 principals.
To implement the principle of Umoja, we can nurture a space where students hold each other accountable during class attendance.
When encountering a student’s name on the attendance list that is not present, rather than moving onto the next name, we must acknowledge that that person is not present and encourage their peers to be concerned with the whereabouts of that student. More than likely, there is a student that has the contact information of the missing student, and can reach out to them to ensure their safety.
Through Umoja, a homeplace that identifies students as subjects rather than objects could be created within the classroom. In unity, if one student is missing from the classroom, the other students should be equally concerned and responsible to ensure that the student catches up from the missed lesson and/or is present the next day. Education is a common goal that should be achieved with unity.
2. Kujichagulia or Self-Determination: To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves.
Kujichagulia represents the importance of agency. This principle encourages students to claim their voice and define themselves and how they want to be perceived from those beyond our created community and homeplace.
Collectively, Kujichagulia can be easily implemented by giving agency to students to name their classroom.
While this may seem elementary, giving the space for the students to work together to find some sort of commonality and agreeableness to create a classroom name creates the building block of the class. It is the act of naming the community and having a sense of belonging and purpose that helps creates homeplace within the classroom. Try giving them examples, such as ‘Ms. Brown’s Class Clowns’, ‘The Mean Green 19’, etc.
By permitting self-determination in the classroom, a homeplace is cultivated allowing students to define who they are as a collective whole and will set the tone for the academic months to come, dictating their own community experience and culture.
3. Ujima or Collective Work and Responsibility: To build and maintain our community together and make our community’s problems our problems and to solve them together.
Ujima speaks on the strength in numbers. American culture socializes us to be very independent in school. Students believe that they are only responsible for their grade, not their peers. Ujima encourages us to work together to accomplish our community’s collective issues.
While students may express a strong hatred for them, group projects are the best way to implement Ujima.
Group projects can be fun and exciting when students are strategically placed into groups. Before student begin group projects, they should have spent much time in the classroom and displayed enough information for us to identify the role they may play in a project. There will also be a visionary, or the leader of a group project. That leader must be grouped with individuals who are willing to challenge, implement, expand, and evangelize their ideas. Group projects organized in this manner would allow students to identify their strengths and ability to solve collective work.
By encouraging the class community to work together to tackle a common issue, this strengthens the community’s relationship and empowers students to identify how their strength can complement their peers weakness and vice versa.
4. Ujamaa or Cooperative Economics: To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together.
Ujamaa works to illustrate the importance of investment. It grows out of the fundamental communal concept that wealth belongs to the people that create it and no one person should accumulate an excessive amount of wealth that would empower them to impose unequal relations. Ujamaa emphasizes the belief that one’s wealth will benefit the community and be put towards the established homeplace.
Rather than one student working towards a personal reward, having the students work collectively for a reward that benefits everyone embodies the principle of Ujamaa.
Classes can be rewarded for a range of desirable behaviors. Students should be told the award they will earn as well as how they can earn it. Desirable behaviors such as everyone submitting their homework in on time and completed or full and timely attendance can be awarded with a class movie or a themed dress day, where everyone dresses according to a theme.
From the concept of cooperative economics, classrooms can become a site of collective wealth and reward. The individual prosperity of a student now becomes a reward for the community and teaches how self-empowerment compliments collective empowerment.
5. Nia or Purpose: To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
Nia encourages us to look within to set goals that will benefit the community, rather than ourselves. This principle upholds the need to restore, develop, and celebrate the community and homeplace that we thrive in.
Nia can be illustrated in the classroom by allowing the class to set their own class expectations.
This would be most fitting in the beginning of the course, semester, or marking period. Students will work together to compose a list of behaviors and attitudes they expect to see within themselves and their peers. Expectations such as, “listen to listen and not to speak”, “one mic, one speaker”, etc. are great examples of expectations that would encourage the creation of homeplace.
As classroom leaders, we can guide these expectations to ensure that the classroom environment is based on efforts that restore, develop, and celebrate the community and homeplace.
6. Kuumba or Creativity: To do always as much as we can to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
Kuumba teaches to use our individual strengths and talents to beautify and inspire the world around us for a long-lasting positive impact.
The creation of classroom roles can guide the principle of Kuumba.
A theatric class reader, an organized note taker, and a virtual DJ are examples of roles that give responsibility to students and highlight their individual strengths and talents. They allow students to invest into their classroom community with their unique contributions.
Through the implementation of Kuumba, classrooms become a site of expression and creativity that nurtures a positive class community and homeplace through responsibility and personal contribution.
7. Imani or Faith: To believe with all our hearts in our people and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
Imani comes with no dogma or teachings. Instead, it serves as a principle that sustains and inspires us all. It carries the philosophy of Ubuntu (a Zulu word), roughly meaning, ‘I am who I am because of who we all are’. This African aphorism articulates a basic compassion for others, understanding that community and homeplace is meant to empower students to become their best selves.
Mary McLeod Bethune, a notable educator, once said: “Without faith nothing is possible; with faith nothing is impossible”. Faith empowers us to plan for the future and invest in ourselves and others. When we have faith in our parents and students, we do our best (the 6th principle, Kuumba) to learn and achieve, and vice versa. Faith is the commitment or contract we make between our community to be more supportive and to demonstrate faith within our homeplace.
