Rationale
I have been teaching Chemistry for twenty-three years. My formative teaching experience was at Richmond Community High School, one of the first nationally accredited secondary school programs for Gifted and Talented "minority" students. I have also taught at a large suburban high school, a "disadvantaged" inner-city high school, and the Governor's School for Government and International Studies. Currently, I teach Chemistry, Human Anatomy and Hatha Yoga at Open High School in Richmond, Virginia (www.richmond.k12.va.us), which is a unique high school because the students come from various school zones throughout the city and they represent myriad achievement levels.
One evening I was taking a walk through my neighborhood. When I passed the nearby middle school I started to think about the choices and opportunities available to my students. This particular middle school has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the city. There is also a disproportionate homicide rate for AAma in this neighborhood. Many of my students live in this area. They matriculated through this school.
How can I make Chemistry relevant for them? What can I do to motivate them to study? How can I get them to appreciate science? These are questions that I asked myself? Then it hit me like a meteor. The answer was everywhere I looked. Matter was there in the sidewalk, in the passing cars, in the street lamps, in the grass, in the trees, in the air. You could find it in food, clothing, even an ipod has matter. Getting students to make positive connections between school and home is the critical challenge that really matters for public school teachers.
Maybe so many people emerge from the American educational system functionally illiterate because they are resisting, refusing to read the world the way they're being taught it (Cox 1980). According to Haki Madhubuti, these disparities point to the constant and growing need for an African-centered pedagogy and praxis (Warfield-Coppock 1992). AAma have a lifestyle that emphasizes a healthy combination of the psychomotor, intellectual, and affective modes of personality, which are characterized by a high degree of expressiveness. Within AAma expressiveness lie important therapeutic and educational variables crucial to AAma mental health and well-being.
The poor academic and social performance of AAma has been linked to the lack of role models, low self-esteem, hopelessness, productivity dysfunction, and low expectations by the school, communities, and society at-large (Bailey 2004). The homicide rate among youth ages 15 through 19 in Richmond was 64.55 per 100,000 in 2004, compared to the national average of 9.32 out of 100,000. Richmond Public Schools reported 2,788 violent incidents in 2004-2005, including 1,036 assaults (Masho 2006).
According to the Centers for Disease Control, homicide is the leading cause of death nationwide for African-Americans, age 10 to 24. Youth from severely disadvantaged backgrounds are significantly more likely to be victims of violence (Masho 2006). National educational and judicial policies along with state standardized testing have intensified the struggle for AAma to achieve academic and social excellence. The federal imperative to "Leave No Child Behind" combined with mandatory end of course testing on the state level places AAma at a tremendous risk for poor performance in the academic and social arenas.
During the 2006 - 2007 school year, forty-five percent of my African-American students were AAma. Eighty-five percent of my Chemistry students were African-American as a whole. Twelve percent were White Americans and three percent were Asian-Americans. Fifty-six percent were female. Although ninety-four percent of the students passed the end of course test, it was only AAma who failed on their first attempt.
Many educators, community leaders, and even some school systems believe that enrichment initiatives geared toward the special needs of AAma can reverse the present trend toward failure within the educational system as well as society. Current literature regarding enrichment initiatives for AAma reveals several common components. These include African/African-American history and educational enrichment activities (Bailey 2004). Black art forms (e.g. music, dj-ing, poetry, mc-ing, creative movement, B boy-ing, drama, graphic expression) have important implications for AAma (Lee 1987). Although this curriculum unit focuses on the ISE needs of AAma, it is designed for all ethnic backgrounds and both genders.
In inner city schools where young people have encountered frequent violence and abuse, teachers must design and implement culturally relevant curricula to prevent or reduce alienation, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression and aggression in the classroom. When you're dealing with kids that come from conditions of poverty, and kids with an urban youth culture that they bring to the table, it gets denied by the school. It's very difficult for teachers who are usually from some other ethnic background. Teachers have to learn new cultures, and kids have to learn a new culture in order to make classrooms click (Tobin 2006). Curriculum designers, who fail to incorporate "minority groups" values into the curriculum, refuse to accept and legitimize the student's language, demonstrate actions that point to the inflexibility, insensitivity, and rigidity of a curriculum designed to benefit those who wrote it (Cox 1980).
Researchers have found that arts learning can have a defined impact on the academic performance of students in an urban setting. Harvard Project Zero suggests that arts activities for all students scheduled on Fridays and Mondays reduce absentee rates on those days. Furthermore, music ensembles can promote the goals of self-motivation, empathy and self-awareness, reducing drop-outs, violence, and the negatives that arise from boredom and lack of peer interaction (Colewell 1996).
Beyond the Atom is an interdisciplinary unit—that consists of teaching science principles, reading across the curriculum and utilizing the performing arts—designed to captivate the interest of my students and inspire them to appreciate who, what, and where they are in time and space. I believe this approach will reach the hearts, as well as the minds, of all my students. It will insure that hundreds of inner-city students develop creative analysis, cultural synthesis, and emotional intelligence. My classroom appears as unconventional as my teaching. There are no lab tables or tools, and the only visible signs that this is a science class are a model of the human body and the Periodic Table of Elements chart that hangs above the chalkboard (Walters 2004).
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