Background
I teach in a Title I High School that has a demographic population of 98% African-American, 1% Hispanic and 1% Caucasian. The school is bordered on one side by a major freeway, and on the other side by five consecutive housing projects. 82% of the students who attend the school live in one of the projects, 10% of the students live in adjoining communities, and 8% live outside of the school zoning and are allowed entrance based upon the school's policy of open enrollment. More often than not those who attend on an open enrollment status do so because they are court ordered, released from a detention center, or expelled from another school.
The entrance of the school has three large doors with each door being framed by an electronic airport-style metal detector. These three doors lock promptly thirty minutes after the first class of the morning begins and remain locked until the final bell of the day at which time students promptly leave on the same yellow school bus in which they arrived. With limited afterschool clubs and activities, the long school hallways are often vacant and silent twenty minutes after the final bell of the day.
Because of the school's insistence on the transparency of personal items for safety purposes, students are not allowed to bring a backpack or a bag lunch. The lunches, which are usually prepared off site and delivered each morning, cost students three dollars.
The 100,000 square foot interior of the school has two floors and is divided into hallways and wings. There are eight security guards who patrol the school's inside borders and two Richmond City policemen who are stationed there full time. The school, which is the oldest in the Richmond Public Schools, has had several locations since its inception in 1867. In its most recent incarnation (completed in 1992), the school was built to house 1,300 students. The total enrollment for 2009/2010 school year hovered at roughly 725 students, but the average daily attendance was usually around 600 students.
While such facts and numbers do not suggest an ideal learning environment, a school-wide renaissance of thought and action is beginning to percolate among the administration, faculty, and community. One notion that is glaringly clear is the lack of distinction between a student's community and home environment and his learning environment at school. The safe-haven, protective quality from the outside world that many school environments offer for students has become quite diluted with those recognizable agents that protect us all from aggression and threat. From a biographical perspective, what is entirely fascinating about this contradiction is the psychological and emotional irony that is played out with the students I teach. Those prefab walls they have assembled to protect themselves and their identities are only accentuated by a school environment that literally and figuratively contains them.
So often public school language art courses focus on teaching the breadth of literature. Nearly every secondary school has a course entitled Introduction To Literature or American Literature or British Literature. But the semester long examination of biography is different. The extended study creates a way for students to intimately understand biography as a form. For students who have experienced trauma in their communities and aggression in their school environments, it can begin to help them internalize the sacred, safe place that is a school and that is their life.
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