Ayesha Imani, Ph.D., is a Quaker educator who serves as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Sankofa Freedom Academy. She is also one of the founders. This is part two of a two-part interview with Ayesha about community energy, spiritual focus, Quaker educational ideas, and the creation of the Sankofa Freedom Academy Charter school.
Q: What is a ‘Freedom School’ and where did the concept originate?
When I think about Freedom Schools, I think about Ed Nakawatase of American Friends Service Committee; he was in the first freedom school that most people associate with the term.
In some ways Freedom Schools grew out of the summer of 1964 when students went down to Mississippi to fight against forms of oppression in voting and de jure segregation. Folks had gone to take a stand in Mississippi around civil rights and there were a number of freedom projects: freedom rides, or sitting at the segregated restaurant counters, but one of the projects was a summer program where the community could come, could learn more about their heritage and their culture, but also could work on literacy. And, in the evenings these would become places where the new parents would come for political action.
The Freedom School was kind of an organizing tool. A way to get our young people feeling good about themselves, good about their history, and to strengthen their literacy skills. It was also a tool against oppression. We have continued that tradition.
Q; How does the Freedom School concept blend with Quaker education at Sankofa?
Normally Freedom Schools are not permanent schools, and Sankofa is the first public Freedom School in the country. It is organized based on freedom school philosophy and principals—with a blend of Freedom School and Quaker education.
There were any number of us involved in the beginning of Sankofa who, like (my son) Isa, had come through Quaker schools.
I know that Quaker education can work for just plain old kids. I know that you don’t have to be academically elite. I know you don’t have to have money. We Quakers are so afraid to really say ‘this thing you do in (Quaker) education, it can work for poor kids, kids whose parents don’t have an education. It can work for special education children!’
Q: But it can, right?
For the most part we Quakers educate people who are privileged in some way, whether they are… academically elite, or from a social class or economic perspective that is elite. We get excited because it works…we send folks to Harvard and Yale and Haverford College, but my thing is that; don’t you know that there are children who need this even more? Or as much as those that get it? And that Quaker education can work with regular children?
Q. In this time of Covid, how has your school been impacted?
We have just for the first time hired a full-time social worker because it is so needed here. Especially post Covid, I can’t imagine what schools are functioning without social workers to support families. It’s not enough to try to support children, especially if you have elementary children, because so much of their struggle has to do with issues that have to do with their families, and their families need support.
Q: A Charter School is free to all students and open to all different kinds of learners. What has been different in terms of working with the public charter school model? What have you made work well at Sankofa?
There are all kinds of ways we haven’t been able to not have charter school pressure around test taking, but there are aspects of Quaker schooling that we have been able to make a part of our program.
Whether its service learning or social justice work, or international service, we do have those opportunities that my children—who went to George School and other Quaker Schools—had.
We have an approach to sports where not only everybody plays that wants to play, but that everybody has to play a team sport. Everybody has to have the experience of what it means to work together, to lose together, to try together.
My children wouldn’t have been athletes had they not been in schools where ‘everybody is going to play’. That’s not something that is done in public schools.
So, at first when we said that that’s what Sankofa is going to do, we were told – ‘you’ll never win anything…’ and then we just won state basketball championship. How could that have happened with the little ragtag group that we have? Everybody, before graduating, has to play something.
We make sure we start everyday with pouring the libations (an African tradition) with some (Quaker) silence. We really work on helping young people to have opportunities to affirm one another. As we model how we affirm one another and lift one another up, we build this culture – that it’s ok to love and lift each other up, and to give loving critique. We talk about what loving critique looks like and feels like. We work on: how do we speak to each other’s humanity? How do we love each other?
We talk about our African principles being in the ethos of love. Everything springs from that. We make decisions through consensus—though as a Board we must record votes. We keep talking until we get a sense of what we should be doing as a community.
All of these different aspects of Quakerism and what we’ve thought of as Quaker education—which is very student centered, and very much connecting not just the academic and the spiritual, but also connecting us all to the world around us—come with the understanding that with our faith, and whatever we are building on the inside, should empower us to make a difference on the outside.
When we put our Freedom School experience together with our Quaker school experience we said, “Let’s bear witness.” And that is what we are trying to do here.
Q: What are the challenges in this work? What isn’t easy?
A: If you look at our data, our children grow. More than the majority of our children will make progress from one year to the next, and yet our children come to us so often so far behind. To say ‘we are turning out children at the twelfth-grade level, and all have complete mastery in English in Mathematics’ — that is not necessarily what happens.
What we do turn out is children who are willing to try and persevere, willing to do that paper over again, willing to face their shortcomings and willing to care. To understand they are supposed to live life with a purpose.
They are used to believing that they can make a difference and that their thoughts matter. They don’t think that adults are their enemies. They are able to focus themselves, be audible, and to ask for help.
Maybe your SAT score is not going to be high, but if you really are willing to work and believe that you are there for a purpose; that’s what we teach our students.
Q: Can you talk a bit about the impact Sankofa has on students? What do students take away from their Sankofa experience?
Sankofa has a big senior project we do–like Friends schools all do–with an internship that addresses some social concern. I’ll never forget one of our girls who wanted to do her project on ‘how do you impact young people’s sense of purpose?’
I remember when she first brought this up, her teachers said, “you mean self-esteem; people have done self-esteem studies and it’s showing that Black kids have lots of self-esteem.” She said “no, that’s not it, that’s not what I want to study.”
Her teachers were saying you can’t do this project. But I met with her, and understood that she was talking about something different. She had found a gap in the literature: there really aren’t a lot of studies on young people having a sense of purpose and how that purpose can make a difference in their outcomes.
She told me:
I was on a really bad road and then I got involved with Freedom School and started tutoring kids, and I now think of myself as this freedom fighter.
I felt like I had a purpose. That there was something I was supposed to do in the world. I stopped being in trouble and I focused on my purpose. I think there is something to that, and I want to be able to study it and figure out how we can increase it. It makes a difference – this sense of purpose we get in Freedom School.”
I urged the teachers to let her do her intellectual work and give permission for the Sense of Purpose Project. Because she really did have something!
I suggested she take it to college with her. To continue to study the whole relationship between positive outcomes and the sense that ‘I’m here for a reason and I’ve got to be busy. I’m not going to be here long, but there is a reason that I’m here, and I’ve got to tend to that reason.’
She went on to college and I think she is in a Masters’ program now in psychology, and she is still working on the concept.
So often, young people don’t have that sense that the world needs them; the community needs them. That is a part of what we try to pour into our children: ‘The world needs you: You were born for a reason and you’re still here. Because some people were born the same year you were, and they are not here anymore, but you are, and you have to get busy and “get on your Nia,” (an African expression that means ‘your purpose’).
Our principal says every day; “have a good day on purpose, with a purpose.” So, be on your Nia.
Our young people can make a difference in the world and then create projects where they actually get a chance to try effect change in their families or their communities.
That’s what Quakerism is about. What Quaker education is about!
I am hoping we are bringing forth a generation of young people who are prepared to join their efforts with their efforts of others to address conditions in the world.
Part I of this interview was published on February 3
Photo credit: All photographs are provided by the Sankofa Freedom Academy.
