Araba A. Z. Osei-Tutu

Araba A. Z. Osei-Tutu, Ph.D., is a BANGA Postdoctoral and BECHS-Africa Fellow, and a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Teacher Education, University of Ghana, Legon. As an African-centered methodologist and multidisciplinary researcher in education, who developed the African Oral Traditional Storytelling (AOTS) Framework and multidisciplinary researcher in education, her research interests include curriculum studies, curriculum development and implementation, pedagogy, culturally and linguistically responsive education, Literacy and English Education, indigenous language and research frameworks, African and Ghanaian feminisms, and postcolonial/decolonial studies in education.

Keynote Talk: Whose Story, Told How, and For Whom? African Oral Traditions and a Decolonial Praxis in Qualitative Research

There is a way stories begin in the places I come from. Someone calls, and the people answer as we gather around the fire – that is older than books. Listen. A grandmother speaks, and what she says is not only hers, for it has been held by many mouths before her own, tested by many ears, and it will be carried, after her, by those still learning to listen. This is how knowledge moves, and this is how knowledge is known to be true. I wish to bring this way of knowing into the room where we gather, not as ornament but as method. For many seasons now, qualitative research has listened attentively to decolonial critique, learning to name what was taken, what was silenced, what was translated into a grammar that was never ours. Yet critique alone does not build a house. The time has come to build, and the African Oral Traditional Storytelling Framework is one such house whose rooms I wish to walk us through. We will enter by three doorways, each a question the elders have always asked of any story worth telling. Whose story is told, where we will find that storytelling in African traditions is not data waiting to be collected but a whole way of developing and sharing knowledge. How is it told, where we will meet the older criteria of truthfulness: the witness of community, the agreement of generations, the blessing of elders, and the coherence of the telling itself. And for whom is it told, because a story that does not return to its people has not yet finished being told. These pose questions that carry us into curriculum, into literacy, and into the classrooms where we decide whose voice is heard and whose knowledge counts. Come. Let us sit. There is a story to tell.