Culture & Community | Arts & Culture | Westville | Arts & Anti-racism | Education
Top: SLC Founder Amelia Sherwood with Oaklynn Caporale and Corrine Horton, both four. Bottom: Ada Clark. Lucy Gellman Photos.
It was a grey Monday morning on Blake Street, but spirits were bright inside Sankofa Learning Center. Near the center of the room, Amelia Sherwood crouched at a kid-sized table and conjured the image of a pond, frogs hopping happily about. Ladybugs and bumblebees buzzed overhead.
If two frogs hopped in from a rock and two more hopped in from a log, she asked, how many frogs were in the pond?
Four-year-old Oaklynn Caporale considered the frogs. She took two, and then two more, from a wooden dish Sherwood had placed on the table. She looked expectantly at 4-year-old Corrine Horton, who sat beside her. There were four frogs in front of them, sitting on their haunches as if they were ready to spring forward.
"Excellent!" Sherwood said. Oaklynn smiled and prepared to bring a hand to her lips, and then her forehead, as she had so many times before. "Kiss your brain."
These lessons—delivered, always, with a side of self-love—are common at Sankofa Learning Center (SLC), a Montessori preschool designed to center kids and families living across the African Diaspora. Three years after Sherwood dreamed it into being, the school is working to grow its educational footprint in the city's Westville neighborhood, where it operates out of Elm City Montessori School.
Enrollment for the current school year is open and rolling; Sherwood currently has space for 12 more students. Class runs from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and centers self-directed and group learning, play and outdoor education. Learn more and apply here.
"I always say that it was birthed out of what I wanted for my own children," Sherwood said last week, during a quiet moment in morning lessons on the alphabet, mathematics, and hands-on artmaking. "What is unique is we put culturally-affirming education first, and then we are a Montessori school."
While the story of SLC begins in the first years of the Covid-19 pandemic, its roots—like the Akan proverb and symbol it is named after—go back to Sherwood's own childhood in Naugatuck. As a kid, Sherwood got through elementary and middle school without ever having a Black teacher—an experience that is still jarringly common for young people in the state.
Last year, educators of color made up 30.5 percent of teachers in the New Haven Public Schools, while students of color made up 90.1 percent. That’s a 59.6 percent difference, according to the State Board of Education.
It was only after coming to New Haven, where she attended Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, that Sherwood started to see teachers who looked like her. It was life-changing, she remembered. Harriett Alfred, who directs Co-Op's choir program, suggested that she might be interested in a Historically Black College or University, or HBCU. When she attended Lincoln University, Sherwood could see why: she got to experience the depth and breadth of the African diaspora in everything she did at the school, from her classes to her peer group to her studies in sociology.
Co-teacher Alicia Tyson-Sherwood.
For years—and as she also became a mom—she worked within other Montessori spaces. Shortly after graduating college in 2011, Sherwood joined the Montessori School on Edgewood as a co-teacher. When Elm City Montessori opened in 2014, she became an assistant teacher and its first dean of social and emotional learning. She remained there through the first years of the pandemic, bringing new initiatives like "One Book, One School" into ECMS' classrooms.
And yet, she felt like something was missing from the Montessori conversation. While the Montessori approach has grown in popularity since the turn of the 20th century, Montessori schools have only started to talk about race, colonialism, and decentering whiteness in the last four or so years—discussions that are still overwhelmingly led by well-intentioned white educators teaching Black and Brown kids. Resources like the Black Montessori Education Fund (BEMF), which supports Black Montessorians and teachers-in-training, have only been around since 2020.
Sherwood, who was balancing her anti-bias, anti-racism work for ECMS with teaching her two sons at home during the pandemic, started playing with the idea of her own Montessori space (she was also working on a culturally-relevant early reader, Mae We Be Free, that is now out in the world). During a sabbatical in 2021, she launched SLC as a part-time homeschool collective out of her home in Newhallville. As an educator and a mother, she hoped it could fill a need that her own kids, now nine and 11, had both experienced in their first years of school.
"This is my freedom dream," she said. "It heals a part of my inner child" who wasn't able to receive the same culturally relevant education. In keeping with education guidelines, she accepts students who are between 2.9 and five years old.
In November of this year, she made the move from her home onto Blake Street, where a bright, pristine classroom is filled with pint-sized tables, easels at kid level, a cozy corner with pillows, fabric-wrapped canvas prints and bookshelves, and books with characters who embrace the depth of the African, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latine diasporas. Montessori materials fill what seems like every nook and cranny, from a sand tray for practicing the alphabet to phonetic reading blocks in clean blue and red script.
What it means to center Africa within that is fairly straightforward, she said. When students learn about the birth of humanity, for instance, they start with the African continent, which was the cradle of civilization but is rarely prioritized in early education. Circle time, which is accompanied by a drum, is called "Harambee," after the Swahili term for to pull together and gather. Familiar titles like Duck Duck Moose and The Story of Snow sit alongside books that celebrate Black and Brown characters, like Connie Schofield-Morrison's I Got The Christmas Spirit and Rekha Rajan's Disaster Squad series. The classroom is gearing up to learn about Kwanzaa, which this year begins on Dec. 26.
There is plenty of cross-cultural pollination too: this year, students talked about Día de Muertos, bringing in photos of grandparents and loved ones who have passed away. At an altar that still stands, decorated in batik fabric and adorned with photos, toys, and flowers and a single candle, students are able to ask questions and talk openly about loss, a key component of Montessori's emphasis on building empathy and self-regulation. On Monday, an inch-high Bluey toy sat upright at the center, honoring a recent ancestor whose favorite color was blue.
Sherwood also focuses on the importance of play and of nature in early childhood development: kids spend blocks of time discovering West Rock Park outdoors (the park sits just across the school’s parking lot), and doing unstructured play in the afternoon. Even in that, they're reminded of the breadth and diversity within a diaspora, simply by being around their peers.
On a recent Monday morning, that vision was in full swing, as Sherwood and her mom, co-teacher and longtime educator Alicia Tyson-Sherwood, welcomed kids and parents into the classroom after a weekend away. As kids slipped off their shoes (everyone wears Crocs or clogs in the classroom) and placed backpacks in their cubbies, adult chatter rose around them: brief check-ins, a few notes from the weekend, discussions of whether a mom and daughter would keep their hats switched for the day. Drop off is quick but warm: Sherwood centers the whole family as part of her approach.
Students fanned out across the room, Sherwood bouncing between them. Corrine, who is four, calmly collected a sand tray with letters of the alphabet, and began to work with the letter F. She studied the card in front of her, drawing a neat f shape in the sand as Sherwood came over. As she passed Oaklynn's station, she made time to study the colors and shapes that bloomed across her page, sometimes accompanied by murmurs of excitement.
"What starts with ffffffff?" she asked. Corrine took a beat. "Fish!" she exclaimed.
"What else?" Sherwood asked. Corrine nodded. "Fishy?"
"Yes! What else?" Sherwood asked. "What goes ribbit?"
"Frog!" Corrine announced. She smoothed out the sand before her, and replaced the letter F with the letter T. Minutes later, she was reading the early reader Sis to this reporter with a fluidity and cadence that didn't falter once.
At a table closer to the window, Tyson-Sherwood worked with a student (his parents asked to withhold his name) to build a garage out of magnetic tiles, the roof with see-through, sharply slanted edges. Every so often, another one snapped into place, and she leaned forward to explore this world coming into focus. When she championed his bilingual skills—he speaks both English and German—he replied with an immediate, smiling "Ja!"
As the school year continues, Sherwood said, her hope is that more parents can discover Sankofa for themselves—and that many of them find it is also the right fit for their child or children. While there are groups like Montessori Schools of Connecticut and the American Montessori Society, they aren't particularly good at fostering dialogue between Montessorians. For instance, Sherwood said, she only recently learned about an educator in Bridgeport who is making the same effort to teach with a focus on Africa. She feels like people don't know that SLC exists. Eventually, she would love to hire another co-teacher to grow the center's work.
"This is my freedom dream," Sherwood said. "It heals a part of my inner child."
"I want them to know that it's here!" she said. "Everybody is doing amazing work in the state, and somehow, things are falling under the cracks."
Her main priority, she added, is making sure that current students get what they need. "There are real implications for Black children if they don't get an academic foundation," she said. In every other part of their day, these young people may contend with the existence of white supremacy in the books they're given, the extracurriculars they pursue, the act of living their lives in New Haven. They don't need to face it at school, too.
That was on display as she called students over for Harambee, pulling out a hand drum as she took a seat on the floor. One by one, students gathered around her, remembering to give each other space as they moved to the music. Together, they reviewed the days of the week and the weather, Sherwood's drum a steady heartbeat.
"Take a seat! Take a seat! Take a load off of your feet!" she chanted and drummed. "You all are working really hard today so I think you all deserve some shout-outs!" she said. Within seconds students were praising each other with movement, their hands gliding through the air as if they were a roller coaster.
"Who wants to dance?" she asked. Four little hands went up. Among them, three-year-old Ada Clark beamed when it was her turn. Sherwood, her face filled with light, put her spin on Sherley Ellis' "The Name Game" and tapped out a beat.
"Ada Ada bo-ba-da! Banana-fanna Fo-fa-ada! Fee-fi-fo-fada! A-da!" she sang. At the center of the run, Ada took her moment in the spotlight, arms extended, head bobbing, eyes gleaming as she hopped. Sherwood wasn't quite done.
"Get free! Get free! Get free! Get free!" she said, and it was like an offering to the room.