Rationale
At Thomas Alva Edison High School & John C. Fareira Skills Center, between Front Street and American, Hunting Park Avenue and Luzerne Street, 96% of the students qualify for the U.S. government’s free lunch program, so we all get one, and breakfast, too; 28.5% receive Special Education services in the form of Individual Education Plans and 29.1% are English Language Learners; however, the dominant factor with which my students identify above all else is their ethnicity: .7% identify as Asian, .9% as White; 23.6% as African American, and a majority 74.1% as Latino.1
At Edison, students are primarily Puerto Rican; some are also from the Dominican Republic; and another quarter African American; all our students, however, are inner city kids living predominantly below the poverty line, and they bond in conventional ways: associations through the neighborhoods from where they live, recreational activities including sports teams and clubs, and fashion. What is there to do, though, when the school hasn’t enough money to fund clubs and extensive extra-curricular activities for the nearly 1400 students and the school district is underfunded to the tune of $190 million?
When I began graduate school in 1999 I tutored English Language Learners inside Edison’s bilingual library. Once hired as a teacher in the School District, I taught only a mile away on the other side of Roosevelt Boulevard at Olney High School, a rival public school that shared siblings and neighbors with kids at Edison; we also shared nearby Hunting Park. Ten years on the persistently dangerous list of high schools before I even set foot through the main door, my solution was to take my kids out of the building on field trips as often as possible; while our home base was the school, we tried to get as far away as we could from it. Now back at Edison, similar problems such as overcrowded and dangerous hallways seem so distracting that the effort to arrange off-campus trips gets lost in the shuffle. In this unit, however, we utilize the support of our Principal, a former teacher and Assistant Principal at Edison, to explore the neighborhood, imagining ways that engaging with the neighborhood’s past can inform ways to make our own improvements. What can my students see that I and other adults have missed? What do students know that we do not? In this unit, students will learn about the history of the public place in order to enrich their spirit of inquiry, motivate them to perform independent research, and stimulate them to contribute to the built environment, in order to give our city something that it needs.
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