Social Representations of the Africentric School as Portrayed hrough the Toronto Newspapers Les représentations sociales de l’école afrocentrique dans les journaux torontois Mobolaji Lalamme-Lagoke Lilian Negura University of Ottawa abstract In 2007, the Toronto District School Board announced a proposal to open an Africentric public elementary school, which would bring to the fore the experience and knowledge of people of African and Caribbean descent. his proposed project led to a debate in the Canadian media, with public opinion being divided between supporters of the proposal and those who opposed it. his article presents a study of the social representations of the Africentric school conveyed by the Toronto newspapers as they covered this debate. hrough thematic content analysis, two diferent social representations of the Africentric school were identiied, the main elements of which were the idea of segregation and the empowerment of the Black community. résumé En 2007, le conseil scolaire de Toronto annonce le projet d’une école primaire publique afrocentrique, basée sur les expériences et les savoirs des personnes d’origine africaine et antillaise. Le projet proposé devient l’objet d’un débat dans les médias canadiens qui a partagé l’opinion publique entre ses partisans et ses opposants. L’article étudie les repré- sentations sociales que l’école afrocentrique a mobilisées dans les journaux torontois suite au débat. L’analyse de contenu thématique a permis d’identiier 2 représentations sociales distinctes de l’école afrocentrique, ayant comme éléments centraux l’idée de ségrégation et l’idée du renforcement de l’autonomie de la communauté noire. In 2007, a proposed project to open an Africentric public elementary school led to a debate in the Canadian media. Public opinion was divided between supporters of the proposal and those who opposed it. Because the media greatly inluence our understanding of social phenomena (Enache, 2006), we set out to study this debate as it was communicated through the Toronto newspapers in order to draw a portrait of the social representations that shaped this new social reality. black education in canada: from segregation to afrocentricity Afrocentricity (also referred to as Africentricity) falls within corrective cultural theories that promote the use of culture to meet the social needs of a community (Giddings, 2003). With regard to schooling, this primarily involves centring the 100 Canadian Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy / Revue canadienne de counseling et de psychothérapie ISSN 0826-3893 Vol. 48 No. 2 © 2014 Pages 100–107