Sankofian Proverbs

Every week I teach three undergraduate courses and advise twenty-two doctoral students. Every week, that work is read through Sankofian Action Inquiry — a framework of twenty-one Adinkra communicators, interpreted across three lanes: researcher, educator, leader.

This is not reflection added on top of teaching. The communicators are the unit of analysis. When a week is coded as enacting Denkyem — adjustment — rather than Damedame — strategy, that is a finding about how the practice actually moved, and it is only sayable in this framework.

The method is simple and the discipline is strict. I reflect on each class the day I teach it. On Friday, the week assembles into a narrative for each course, a coding with evidence quoted from my own words, and two to four concrete changes for the week ahead — each tracked to whether I actually adopted it. When I decline a change, I have to say why. Those refusals are the most useful record in the system.

Students are quoted verbatim or not at all, and never by name. What is published is redacted; the map linking a student to a pseudonym never leaves my machine.

Each week closes with a proverb, chosen by the communicator the week most heavily enacted, and cited to its tradition and source — because a proverb is an epistemology, not an ornament (Dei, 2014).

Teaching produces enormous evidence and almost no record. What a room actually did on a Thursday is gone by the following Tuesday, and with it the material for a conference paper, a book chapter, or a tenure narrative that argues from practice rather than about it.

Akoben Lengo is a working system, not an archive. It asks structured questions on the days I teach, codes what I say against my own analytic framework, and turns the accumulation into writing I can defend.  It is not record-keeping. It is a mechanism for producing scholarship out of the ordinary week!