Secular and Islamic Schooling in Senegal: Reconfiguring Knowledge and Opportunity in Uncertain Times Open Access
Schaller de la Cova, Ana E. (2013)
Abstract
This dissertation examines how Islamic and secular schooling figure into youths' negotiations of modern personhood and the idiosyncrasies and challenges of contemporary Senegalese life. It is based on 22 months of field research in Dakar, Senegal and was funded by the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Emory University (the Graduate School Fund for Internationalization and the African Studies Association). Drawing from Marxist educational theory, the dissertation suggests that contemporary education serves both to potentially enable young people in Senegal and as a source of much frustration and disillusionment. This lived reality of schooling undercuts state and international development discourse, which claim that education is the key to national prosperity and to the realization of people's personal goals for success.
The project's two Islamic and public school case studies are informed by data collected from students' households and their urban neighborhoods. This ethnographic data is complemented and contextualized by archival research into the development of local Islamic and secular schools, media-based analysis of the Senegalese state and public discourse, and anthropological literature on African urbanity, globalization, and modernity. The goal of this study is to examine the reciprocal influence of school socialization and daily living--with particular attention to dynamics of gender, birth order, and household composition with regard to power and agency--in the formation and pursuit of projects of the self.
It argues that urban Senegalese youth attempt to reconcile the disjuncture between conventional belief and their ambitions, on the one hand, with that of their economically-strained circumstances, on the other, by engaging in making do and by cultivating particular public personae. The term "making do" refers to a range of non-mainstream, improvisational, and creative practices people employ to pragmatically negotiate and manage in difficult conditions. While this project examines school choices within the context of Senegalese understandings of the person, it speaks to larger issues about how to deal with changing conceptions and practices of knowledge in the modern world that concern us all.
Table of Contents
1. INTRODUCTION...1
The Scholarship of Schooling
Study Design and Location
Analytic Articulations
Dissertation Map
2. ISLAMIC RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN SENEGAL...41
Contact and Conversion
The Master-Disciple Relationship
Colonial Confrontations
New Muslims and Early Reform
A Contemporary Case: The u13 Franco-Arabe School
Curriculum and Pedagogy: Rote Repetition
Discourses of Personhood and Pragmatic Challenges
Conclusion
3. SENEGALESE PUBLIC SECULAR SCHOOLS...101
Colonial Schools in the Two Senegals
Race, Inequality, and Identity
Independence: Schooling a New Nation
Contemporary Urban Public Education
Shadowing Class 5e E
Curriculum and Pedagogy: Copying the Lesson
Authority, Discipline, and Responsibility
Conclusion
4. OUT OF THE CLASSROOM: EDUCATION'S HOME...164
Dakar's Modern Genesis
Sub(Urban) Struggle Anew
Parcels in the City
Logics of Family and Personhood in Parcelles
Conclusion
5. IMPROVISATION IN THE SENEGALESE MODERN...207
Reading Comics
Defining the Terms and Concepts
Economies of Making Do
Vernacular Meanings
Improvisation in Comparative Context
Managing in Parcelles Assainies
Another Side of Managing
International Góorgóorlus
Conclusion
6. SCHOOL REFORM, SOCIAL REFORM...268
Youth, Citizenship, and Personhood
Music and Social Critique
Student Strikes
Reform and Its Mediation
Islamic Public Education?
Conclusion
7. CONCLUSION...317
About this Dissertation
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