Reporter Volume 25, No.27 May 5, 1994

By BETHANY GLADKOWSKI
Reporter Staff
Nah Dorothy Dove has been spending this year here under the
Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships Program, now in its
third and final year of operation at UB. One of the largest and most
prestigious grant programs in the field, the Rockefeller program is
one of the largest humanities grants in UB history.
	It was presented to the university for "redefining the context
in which American Studies are conducted," and has funded two
fellowships in American and African-American Studies at UB in each of
three residency years.
	As teacher, author, academician and founding member of two
African-centered schools, Nah Dorothy Dove has had considerable
influence on the education of African children in the U.S. and in her
native United Kingdom.
	Dove, who received her doctorate in American Studies from UB,
spent her early childhood in Africa and returned to the London area
when she was six.
	Having gone through England's public school system herself,
Dove says she knew that her own children might face the same racial
obstacles that she experienced. Following the 1970s parent/teacher
movement in England, she began her own efforts 11 years ago by
organizing and running numerous black parent/teacher awareness groups
in London.
	The aim of the groups was to "raise awareness of racism and
show how to deal with it," says Dove. Teachers, in particular, were
asked to focus on what they were telling the children. "Teachers must
look inside themselves and examine what it means to be a teacher," she
says. Often they do not look at the materials critically, Dove says.
And when students feel they are being forced into a system which
excludes them, they resist. "My efforts were a political activity,
really. These schools are part of a long history of resistances," she
says.
	During her school reform activities from 1983 to 1989, she was
also a part-time teacher of black history, social studies, math, and
English at the Kuumba Summer School for Asian and African children,
and also at the Winnie Mandela Supplementary School in London, which
she helped co-found in 1985 "to nurture children who were abused by
the system."
	Dove says she founded the Mandela School in an effort to
resist the discriminatory practices she and others had experienced in
the public school system.
	"We had to have our own schools," she says. "(The state
schools) place a value on human worth based on racial characteristics.
Teachers are trained to put children into a social hierarchy." She
said that they also measure intelligence by the amount of information
that's remembered, not critically evaluated. 
	In Dove's view, this kind of teaching promotes "non-thinking."
The Africans in the U.K. have a history of resistance, she says, but
they are taught to memorize things, not to question them, which allows
mind control.
	Dove said that in order to better fight racism she needed to
know more about European and African histories. She enrolled at the
Polytechnic University of North London (now University of North
London) and received a bachelor of science degree, with honors, in
sociology (with special reference to education) in 1989; from there
she completed a master's program in sociology from the University of
London. She came to the U.S. to earn a doctorate in American Studies
from UB. While she was here, she was a founding member of the Nile
Valley Shule, a full-time, tuition-based African-centered school in
Buffalo. 
	Dove says that the public schools in the U.K. and the U.S. are
exactly the same in their treatment of students. She says that racism
is blatant in both countries, with the exception that the U.S. has a
"more sophisticated legal system" as well as what is called the
American Dream: that through hard work, anyone can succeed here.
People believe the myth of the American Dream, she says, "even though
they know that their own lives may prove to be the exact opposite."
	Dove has given numerous lectures on racism and education.
including "Mothers as Bearers of Culture and Makers of Social Change"
given for the 15th Urban Ethnography Research Forum conference at the
University of Pennsylvania in February.
	Currently Dove is working on a post-doctoral book entitled
"Afrikan Mothers: Bearers of Culture and Makers of Social Change,"
which will feature interviews with 23 mothers in the U.K. and the U.S.
whose children are enrolled in "culturally affirming" schools. She
will try to reveal the personal transformations each experienced
because of the schools, she says, and will emphasize the mothers'
roles as revolutionists or their part in the revolution.