Overview
School and Subject
A Philip Randolph Career Academy is a small career and technical high school in the School District of Philadelphia. Our curriculum includes a variety of career experiences: culinary arts, health related technology, automotive technology, and construction along with a full program of college-preparatory academics. The AP class of 20 students is scheduled as a 90-minute block for the fall semester and as a single period (50 minutes) in the spring. Preparation for May AP test occupies the bulk of time for the second semester.
Namesake
Our school is named for Asa Philip Randolph, one of the greatest human rights activists of the 20th century, a man whose accomplishments are largely unknown among the general citizenry as well as among our student body. Juan Williams, in his 2001 Public Broadcast System tribute, "In Search of A. Philip Randolph," noted that despite statues honoring Randolph at two East Coast train stations (Union Station in Washington, D.C. and Back Bay Station in Boston) and brief citations in some history texts, few would know that "Randolph was the one American leader who had the vision, from early in the century, to use his voice to speak directly to the issue of jobs for black people - including fair wages, union membership, apprenticeships and labor contracts - as the key to racial equality." Yet when Philip spoke out against the expectation that African Americans, subject to lynching at home should risk their lives in army uniforms abroad, he was labeled the 'most dangerous Negro in America' by no less a figure than the Attorney General of the United States.16
Even less well known is the gay man, Bayard Rustin, who collaborated with Randolph on so many worthy causes. Wall Street Journal columnist Joshua Muravchik, in reviewing the recent biographical documentary on Rustin, "Brother Outsider," calls him the civil rights movements "master tactician" and "undoubtedly the most fascinating personality among the constellation of top civil-rights leaders."17 Rustin spent two years in jail for his pacifist-based rejection of military service in World War II. Ironically, today it is the military itself that rejects the service of gay citizens.
Almost any American could, if asked, identify Dr. Martin Luther King and recall the name of the speech he delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. Yet it was A. Philip Randolph who first proposed a March on Washington in the year 1941, on that occasion in an effort to secure equity in war-industry jobs for African Americans; and it was Rustin whose brilliant logistics brought a quarter of a million black and white to marchers to the nation's capital for a glorious day that both celebrated brotherhood and highlighted the distance between our country's ideals and its realities.
Benefit
How poignant the thought that 70 plus years of devoted service to the cause of liberty remains largely invisible to our young people. A. Philip Randolph's achievements addressed the atrocity of lynching, the need for respect, dignity, decent pay and working conditions for organized labor, and the essential justice of an integrated military. Bayard Rustin's efforts, not infrequently in partnership with Randolph, encompassed pacifism, racial reconciliation, support for the interned Japanese, aid for Soviet Jews, and assistance to Vietnamese refugees. By navigating a unit focused on citizen voices, the students at our school - or any school - can learn about our own inspirational figures and many others through extensive reading and perhaps use the example of these endeavors to secure their very own right to speak up and speak out, now and in the future.
It is possible, via the Internet, or for those fortunate enough to visit the Yale Beinecke rare books and manuscripts library or the statue at Union Station in Washington, D.C. to ponder Randolph's own words:
At the banquet table of nature there are no reserved seats.
You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold.
If you can't take anything, you won't get anything; and if you
Can't hold anything, you won't keep anything.
And you can't take anything without organization.18
Elements
Connection to Student and School Life
Secondary students in Philadelphia enter their high schools every day in a manner not unlike prisoners of war. They must dress in easy-to-identify uniform clothing, register their presence electronically with a photo I.D., and pass both body and possessions through a metal detector. As a majority African American school in an age of racial profiling, we have a substantial number of students who have had close encounters of the unpleasant kind with police authorities. Parents and guardians routinely instruct their youngsters, especially their boys, on how to interact with police in a way that will reduce the likelihood of inciting the use of force. This past year, our school was part of a pilot program that checked students in through use of a biometric finger identification device. Students lined up compliantly to place their finger on the pad each day, evoking images of Rosa Parks being finger-printed the day she sat down for her rights.
Students complain regularly about being required to dress uniformly, but not too often about the scanner and metal detector. "Custom reconciles us to everything" as Edmund Burke once said. Their conversation frequently turns to another facet of their everyday life in the city: death by gun violence. Virtually every student can name a friend, acquaintance, or family member who has been injured or killed by gunfire. It is not unusual for our school to lose a student to gun violence in the course of the academic year. Some students have personally witnessed a shooting. The state legislature in "Pistolvania" (an adapted spelling suggested by one of my students) has so far been reluctant to accede to Philadelphia's plea for firearms regulations like restricting volume handgun purchases. Could a concert of student voices raised in anguish make a difference?
The seniors I teach are subject, under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2002, to be recruited for military service with the help of contact information provided to the armed forces by the school district. A lack of employment opportunities post high school and rising college costs might induce some of our young people to commit themselves to a career that could land them in yet another shooting zone. An informed study of the history of civil liberties, the struggle for fair employment opportunities, and voicing reluctance to endorse sending young people of color into war to defend a democracy that has often left them in the lurch - all these, the hallmarks of Asa Philip Randolph's lifetime of striving, can provide our students with a depth of understanding about issues that affect them profoundly every day.
Connection to Faculty and Family
Part of our focus will be on the collection of stories from school staff and student families. The age range of staff can cover experiences dating back to World War II, and students may have family members or neighbors who can recount events from even earlier eras. Vietnam era veterans can describe the experience of being shot at on a non-traditional battlefield or the "hits" of disrespect they received upon their return from service. Other veterans, like my brother, can recount their army superior's response to a soldier posted in "Nam" signing a newspaper advertisement in opposition to the war. Teachers who entered the profession in part to avoid the draft can explain their choice. Family members who stayed behind can share the anguish they underwent during their brother's or father's or husband's common one-year assignments in the war zone or the reasoning behind speaking or acting out against the war policies of Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Using the techniques of recording oral history, students will gain a vivid sense of the American history of civil liberties and civil rights in speech and action.
Interdisciplinary Opportunities
Through the research on A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, along with the full roster of novelists, poets and playwrights included in the AP Curriculum, students will have opportunities to make connections between their studies in English literature with areas covered in social studies, science, and perhaps even mathematics. Of particular value for academic partnering will be the traditional American History course as well as the innovative African American History course being introduced as a graduation requirement for the first time in Philadelphia in the fall of 2005. By making a practice of establishing the historical and political settings for each work of literature, students will have a sense of the complete world from which each writer emerged, New Criticism theories of seeing-literature-in-isolation aside! The connections between written expression and war, citizen rights and responsibilities, and civil liberties is clearly drawn by Frederick Douglass during the Civil War, W.H. Auden in World War I, Joseph Heller in World War II, Arthur Miller during the Cold War, and Alan Ginsberg and Audre Lorde in the Vietnam era. Each understood the risk of challenging people and policies in power, yet they never wavered in their confidence that the United States of America afforded them the protection they required to speak and write freely from their hearts.
The Lively Arts
Where school budgets preclude extensive music and art exposure, the "Civil Liberties in Times of War" unit is especially rich in options for enhancing basic study. Songs of protest embody the arguments brought forward by dissenters and offer fascinating histories of their own. "Joe Hill" from the IWW struggles, "Strange Fruit" coming from the Civil Rights era, with a curious link to the Rosenbergs, and "The House I Live In" echoing messages from the heart and profound controversy from World War II through the Cold War, Vietnam, and the War on Terror.19 The strands connecting activists in diverse eras find exemplification in the career of Earl Robinson, writer of both "Joe Hill" and "The House I Live In" who was himself called to Washington to be interrogated by Sen. Joseph McCarthy.20 Bayard Rustin sang with black folk singer, Josh White, who in turn performed one of the better-known versions of "The House I Live In."
Visual art can further amplify understanding of wartime horror with examples like "Guernica," "The Scream," and others. Photography can serve as both a record (Matthew Brady) and a source of dispute (My Lai photos from Vietnam).21 Film treatments of war and civil liberties are another rich source of making vivid for students the anguish and nobility of human experience in war and social protest. Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Grapes of Wrath, Bad Day at Black Rock, and Born on the 4th of July are among the possibilities.
Literature
No help is needed to identify literary works with our theme. The Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition course contains more than enough authors, in addition to those already mentioned, who can certainly be read through the lens of society's power over the individual who speaks out: Adrienne Rich (The Dream of a Common Language), Eugene Ionesco (Rhinoceros), Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five), and James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time).
State and District Standards
State and school district standards, indicated here by underlined phrases, will be incorporated into the curriculum as a sure-fire means of helping prepare students for the Advanced Placement Examination. Attention to these items also establishes continuity with what students have been addressing throughout their high school careers. They need to learn to read independently (and accurately) as both the Advanced Placement test and college will require assignments to be completed without the immediate support of an instructor. They will need to read critically, with an ear and eye for bias, in all content areas. The "Citizen Voices in Peace and War" unit places particular emphasis on the crossover between literature and social studies. Just as students are likely to assume bias in texts written from the creative angle, the factual aura of social studies materials may mislead students into assuming objectivity where a hidden agenda exists under the radar. Being attuned to manipulations in language is essential to their understanding of what is going in their lives right now as they prepare to leave high school, acquire a job, attend college, and, it is to be hoped, register to vote — all during a wartime with no apparent end in sight. Students will of course need to analyze and interpret literature - bolstering their understanding of literary devices and their uses for basic comprehension and higher-level analysis. Confidence and success in the Advanced Placement Examination hinges on the students' real-time experiences in that area of skill. Through a combination of spontaneous and carefully planned, peer edited, and revised writing assignments, especially geared to the Advanced Placement essays, students will gain proficiency and quality in different types of writing. Although oral presentations are not part of the AP English and Composition examination as currently constituted, it is nevertheless important for youngsters to have opportunities to speak with facility in group discussions and for oral presentation. It is in this way that they are able to discern, elucidate and defend their own (eventually) carefully reasoned point of view, which in turn will serve them both educationally and civically. Throughout the entire year's course, students will at all times need to understand the characteristics and function of the English language. Whatever career and/or education path our students take, understanding their own language, the language of the past that found expression in our country's founding documents, the language of current politicians, public documents and news media is critical both to success and survival. Finally, our students need to be adept at meaningful and original research. Academic assignments that demand rigorous and vigorous thinking, critical analysis of sources, whether they be news or magazine articles or books, should and will provide clear instruction and experience in eschewing cut-and-paste plagiarism as well as resisting the assumption that anything in print or on the web is inherently accurate. After extensive reading of original documents establishing the liberty to act and think, after experiencing wide-ranging acquaintance with the tension between government and societal interface with individuals defending their rights, and after thorough-going discussions focused on careful listening, students should be well-prepared to be the actively engaged citizen scholars that the best democracies demand.22
Strategies for Implementing Standards
As we approach each reading assignment, short or long, we will utilize researched strategies for genuine comprehension. These include making predictions about the reading before beginning, sharing what we already know about the topic at hand and scanning the passage(s) for unfamiliar vocabulary.
To make the text more likely to be understood during reading, we will write notes (post-its are handy for this) about any portion of the text not understood and use graphic organizers to classify ideas in the material.
We will "monitor" our comprehension during the reading as a means of self-testing our understanding after reading. The questions we write down during reading can become inquiry, investigation or test questions for discussion, research and assessment afterward. The standard who, what, when, where, why and how questions is one possible format. We can also discuss how the material in the reading connects to what we already knew, how it would be applied in real-world situations, and how our understanding has changed through the process of reading.
Summaries may be spoken or written in class or written for homework.
Readers use summarizing strategies after reading as a means of self-review by identifying the most important points of the text selection. Given the complexity of the reading material, these routines should insure greater understanding.23
Culminating Project and Presentation
Students will select an author or theme to research based on class and independent readings, media sources and lectures, then prepare a multi-media presentation or publication for a specific audience. A student may want to re-enact a speech on a particular constitutional issue, present a mock argument before the Supreme Court, deliver a Court opinion, or dramatize a scene based on one of our readings, or on the life experience of one our authors.
Assessment
In addition to the score received on the AP Test, students will be evaluated on the basis of their in-class and homework essays, following peer and the Self-evaluation Rubric for the Advanced Placement Essays, participation in discussions, classroom presentations, teacher-made tests, AP practice tests, and the culminating multi-media project. The class will develop the rubrics for the project.
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