Lawrence Boakye Dankwah
Research title: Beyond the textbook: Responsive Literacies Education in Postcolonial Contexts through Material and Relational Entanglements
Research Summary
My research explores how basic school teachers in postcolonial contexts negotiate what counts as literacy within everyday school practice. Focusing on Ghana’s standards-based curriculum, I examine how professional learning communities could function not merely as policy structures but as relational spaces where teachers collectively question, reinterpret, and reshape dominant assumptions of deficit framings of their literacy practice. I explore how teachers begin to recognise and legitimise pluriversal forms of meaning-making, including land-based knowledge, indigenous languages, embodied practices, and community knowledge, within the assemblages of formal education.