Rationale
My students, 9th graders at University Prep High School in the Hill District neighborhood of Pittsburgh are among the most disadvantaged in the city. The students in my school are 95% African American.
The majority of my students live in the Hill District, a neighborhood that is but a shadow of its former self. In its heyday from the 1930s to the early 1950s, the “Lower Hill,” was a cultural hub where the culture was alive and flourishing, earning it the nickname, “Little Harlem.” The Lower Hill was home to famous jazz establishments like The Crawford Grill, which hosted musicians John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie. In the mid-1950s, talk of a new arena started to circulate amongst city officials, as well as where best to build it. By this point, the Lower Hill began to resemble a slum, as dilapidated buildings and businesses fell into disrepair. Situated right next to downtown, it seemed the perfect place for the brand new arena. In 1957, the city bulldozed the Lower Hill, forever altering the neighborhood. Community members today are simultaneously nostalgic for the vibrancy their neighborhood once had and proud of their heritage and distinct cultural background.
The community is still making efforts to restore this cultural heritage through their neighborhood schools. Approximately half of my students come from Pittsburgh Miller African Centered Academy, a K-5 school also located in the Hill District. Students are encouraged to embrace their cultural heritage every day in the classroom through immersion practices and use of African American English (AAE). When these students leave elementary school and start sixth grade at University Prep, they leave this culturally-centered approach behind; not only is it discontinued, it goes virtually unacknowledged. Students must then conform to the dominant school culture of speaking and writing in Mainstream American English (MAE).
When students are prohibited from fully expressing themselves, they internalize the message that they themselves are not valued in mainstream society and that any expression other than through mainstream culture is “uneducated,” or “inappropriate.”
We all live with our feet in different worlds, ready to switch our mannerisms and speech to fit the group with whom we interact. For many students, however, they are not given the opportunity to share their home culture within the parameters of traditional school classrooms. They are asked to “jump” and put both feet in, leaving who they are behind.
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