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This School
is My Sanctuary:
by Rene Antop-Gonzalez
June 2003
About the Author: Dr. René Antrop-González is Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research interests include the education of Puerto Rican/Latino urban high school students in the United States, alternative education, critical curriculum theory and qualitative inquiry. He can be reached at <antrop@uwm.edu>. Julian Samora Research Institute Dr. Israel Cuéllar,
Director Suggested Citation Antrop-González,
René. “‘This School is My Sanctuary’ The
Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Alternative High School,” JSRI Working
Paper #57, The Julian Samora Research Institute, Michigan State University, East
Lansing,
Michigan, 2003. "This
School is My Sanctuary" "That’s why I’m
always at this school. This school is my sanctuary. I know this because
once I step outside these doors my problems come back. They’re
just waiting outside the doors to smack me in my face and start all over
again. I stay at this school because I don’t have to worry about
my problems. I got my mind set on other things. It’s hard to
describe, but it’s
like a load is taken off me when I’m here." Introduction Recent studies and personal narratives suggest a connection between the low academic achievement of Latina/o students in the United States to the lack of care they experience in schools (Caraballo, 2000; Nieto, 1998, 2000; Valenzuela, 1999). This lack of care has been defined in multiple ways. For example, one study defined an uncaring teacher as one that did not take the time to assist students with their assignments or answer questions in class (Caraballo, 2000). Other examples of uncaring teachers have included those individuals who failed to respect their students or demonstrate outward signs of support or affection (Nieto, 1998, 2000; Valenzuela, 1999). In fact, as Nieto (1998) observes, “the care or rejection experienced by Puerto Rican students in U.S. schools can have a significant impact on their academic success or failure” (p. 157). Moreover, Nieto (1998) argues that caring school communities can be constructed by those individuals who strive to show support and affection for their students, take the initiative to learn about and from their students, respect and affirm their language and culture, and hold their students to high academic expectations. Likewise, in her study of Mexican-origin students at an inner city Houston high school, Valenzuela (1999) borrows from the theoretical work of Noddings (1984, 1992) who describes two types of caring relationships that can take place between teachers and their students. The first type is “authentic” caring, which describes the reciprocal personal student-teacher relationships that she believes are crucial for the education of Latina/o youth. On the other hand, “aesthetic” caring describes the emphasis that teachers place on things or ideas, such as academics. Additionally, Valenzuela (1999) reveals the overall lack of reciprocal authentic caring relations that took place between students and teachers at the public high school she examined. These authentic caring relationships, she argues, ideally consist of teachers who respect their students’ language and culture. Students, in turn, reciprocate this teacher caring by doing their best academically. In contrast to these authentic caring relations, Valenzuela (1999) witnessed a propensity for teachers to only aesthetically care about their students. This aesthetic caring is marked by teachers’ expectations that students be solely committed to academic ideas or practices that lead to achievement. Researchers also suggest that the low academic achievement of Latina/o students is connected to the intense feelings of marginalization and lack of belonging that these students face in classrooms on a continual basis (Nieto, 1998; Valenzuela, 1999). These students’ sense of marginalization and lack of belonging is often caused by their schools’ failure to view their culture and language as resources. Rather, these are viewed as impediments to their academic success. As a result, these students perceive that schools do not value them for who they are (Nieto, 1998). Likewise, the high school that Valenzuela (1999) examined unconsciously adopted a subtractive schooling approach to education in that it ignored and devalued the cultural and linguistic knowledge that its Mexican-origin students brought to school. On the contrary, she argues that schools must strive to adopt an additive approach to education, which structures curricula around the acknowledgment, use, and building upon students’ cultural and linguistic knowledge. Additionally, Flores-González (2002) reveals how schools structure inequality among Puerto Rican students by influencing whether they adopt a “school kid” versus “street kid” identity. For example, the Puerto Rican students whom she interviewed and classified as having a “school kid” identity were more likely to be sheltered in safe, social niches with other school kids and encouraged by school staff to actively participate in extracurricular activities and enroll in honors classes. These high achieving students were also more likely to view post-secondary education as a way through which they could become a member of the middle class. On the contrary, the low achieving Puerto Rican students adopted a “street kid” identity when they found it difficult to situate themselves within school-oriented peer social networks and the school staff did not encourage, nor facilitate, these students’ participation in school related activities. While this research examines the education of Latinas/os from within traditional school settings, recent research examines alternative school and community-based education resistance campaigns that were undertaken by parents and communities to improve the life chances and structures of opportunities for their children (Ramos-Zayas, 1998; Rivera & Pedraza, 2000; Rolón, 2000; Torres-Guzmán & Martínez Thorne; 2000; Walsh, 1991). For example, Torres-Guzmán and Martínez Thorne (2000) illustrate how Esperanza High School was founded as a “school within a school” in order to build its Latina/o students’ leadership skills and address their cultural and linguistic needs. Interestingly, the students who attended this school expressed the important role that caring teachers played in their lives. These students defined caring teachers as those who openly communicated with them, showed them respect by valuing their language and culture, and offered them personal and scholastic support. Likewise, Rivera & Pedraza (2000) examine New York’s El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, which offers their students an alternative student-centered curriculum and vision based on the principles of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970) and stresses the importance of love and caring, collective self-help, peace and justice, and mastery. Moreover, El Puente Academy encourages its students to connect their education to their respective social realities and become engaged in community projects with the aim of actively transforming their lives and communities. Another study by Ramos-Zayas (1998) focuses on the Chicago-based Pedro Albizu Campos Alternative High School (PACHS) and is interesting for several reasons. First, unlike most of the work that has examined the education of Puerto Ricans in the United States from an east coast perspective, this researcher addresses the role of a community-based pedagogical project born of Puerto Rican resistance within a major midwestern United States urban center. Second, her study frames this high school in relation to the work of other Puerto Rican-based community organizations and their connection to Puerto Rican Chicago’s strong political and ideological tradition of nationalism. In her examination of the PACHS, she focuses on the voices of students and their discussions concerning the role this school played in raising a Puerto Rican political consciousness and how it influenced their desire to become engaged in community activities. More recently, I conducted a study at the PACHS focusing on the experiences of its students and teachers. What I found is that for a school to be effective for Latina/o students and other students of color, it must become a “sanctuary.” By sanctuary, I mean that the school fosters student-teacher caring relationships, provides a familial type environment to insure that its students are not marginalized, provides a gang-free safe space, and affirms students’ racial and ethnic identities. The purpose of this article, then, is threefold. First, I briefly describe the high school. Second, I highlight students’ voices and their descriptions of the “school as sanctuary” concept. Third, I describe the teachers’ experiences pertaining to their difficult task of maintaining the high school as a sanctuary for its students. Methods The PACHS students and staff are sensitive to being studied by outside researchers. This sensitivity to outside researchers had been the result of several negative experiences that the high school had encountered with a “community outsider” who, as a teacher, was actually an undercover FBI agent. Consequently, during the decade of the 1990’s, many students and teachers became the targets of several grand jury indictments that attempted to link the high school to Puerto Rican nationalist organizations, such as the Fuerza Armada de Liberación Nacional (FALN) [refer to Ramos-Zayas, 1997 & 1998 for a further discussion of this FBI targeted surveillance of the PACHS]. Therefore, although I was involved as a volunteer worker with the PACHS intermittently from 1999-2000, it was not until August to October of 2000 that I was permitted by staff and students to collect two types of data for this study. First, I collected and analyzed school related historical and curricular documents. These documents included brochures, archived newspaper reports and a copy of the formal curriculum. These documents enabled me to learn more about the high school’s history and operations, such as why it was founded, how it was funded and accredited, how the school was operated administratively and how its curriculum was structured. Second, I conducted semi-structured one-on-one interviews with eight participants who were involved with the school as students, alumnus or teachers. I decided to interview participants from these particular positions because I wanted to have conversations with individuals who were involved, or had been involved, within the high school on an everyday basis. Additionally, these participants had to meet several criteria that I had established at the beginning of this study. Although I was only able to interview a limited number of participants over a short period of time, these criteria enabled me to select participants who could elicit rich descriptions pertaining to their experiences at the high school. Furthermore, although the small number of participants limits the degree to which I can make generalizations, the findings nevertheless reveal how the PACHS acted as a sanctuary. The criteria were: (1) The
student participants had to be enrolled at the time of the study. Of the three students who agreed to be interviewed, the first was a 19-year-old Puerto Rican male student (Damien), the second was a 17-year-old Puerto Rican female student (Melissa), and the third was an 18-year-old African-American female student (Unique). These students were interviewed after school hours because I did not want to pull them out of their classes. Consequently, many of the students that I approached who initially fit these criteria could not be interviewed because of conflicting schedules with jobs, lack of transportation, or because of their parent/caretaker’s desire that their child not be interviewed. (2) The PACHS alumni participants had to have graduated from the school at least five years prior to the undertaking of this study so that the participant could possibly relate her/his schooling experiences at the PACHS to her/his world of work and/or other life experiences. The principal gave me the names of two graduates who fit this criterion and who could easily be contacted because they were residing in the school’s surrounding community. The participants in this category who were interviewed were both 1986 graduates named Kathy and Pura. Kathy was of dual Latina/o ethnicity (half Mexican and half Puerto Rican) and was a mid-level manager for a multinational corporation. Pura was Puerto Rican and was a city employed social worker. (3) I also wanted to interview “veteran teachers” who were working at the school when the study took place. Consequently, three teachers were interviewed. One was a White English teacher who had been teaching at the PACHS for seven years (Jake). The second was a Puerto Rican female teacher and co-principal who had been at the school for three years (Majandra), and the third had been a teacher and principal of the high school for 19 years (Iván). The interview protocols were designed and analyzed using the constant comparative method (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to discover and generate recurring themes pertaining to the experiences of the high school’s students and teachers and how they were related to the following areas of inquiry: 1) What types of interactions took place between students and teachers? 2) How did students, teachers, and administrators describe their respective experiences at the high school? 3) Why did students choose to attend this particular high school rather than any other of the many traditional (non-chartered and/or alternative) Chicago public high schools? 4) How similar and/or different were the experiences of the female and male participants? 5) Were the experiences of the school’s Puerto Rican students and/or staff members and the school’s non-Puerto Rican students and/or staff members different and/or similar (e.g. African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, those of multiple Latino ethnicity, and/or White)? Finally, my observations and access at the school were also facilitated by my position as an active participant in several ways. I participated in school and community-related events, such as marches and rallies, clean-up detail after community events and tutoring at the school. I also assisted in cleaning the school because the school could not afford the salary of a janitor at the time of the study. Additionally, I also assisted staff members serve students their daily lunches, helped in the production of the school’s 2000 yearbook and participated in the 2000 senior class retreat. I felt compelled to assume these roles because I felt that they would help me “blend in” and become a more familiar sight at the school. I also sincerely believed that my work at the high school would help contribute to its pedagogical mission and enable me to give back to the school in return for the experiences that I was provided. Description of the PACHS History and Description The Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Alternative High School, which currently enrolls 80 students and has an average class size of 12 students, was founded in 1972 as a response to the Eurocentric-based curricula and high dropout rates that Puerto Rican students had been experiencing in Chicago’s public high schools. Historically, the dropout rates among Puerto Rican urban high school students in the United States has ranged anywhere between 45-65% (Flores-González, 2002). An article published on April 8, 1973 in the Chicago Tribune titled, “Puerto Ricans Here Set Up Free School to Aid Dropouts,” described the negative pedagogical conditions that many Puerto Rican high school students faced when the PACHS was founded. The high school was originally named, “La Escuela Puertorriqueña (the Puerto Rican School)” and originated in the basement of a Chicago church. The article stated the reasons why the high school was founded. The school, which opened in February [1972], is geared to aid Puerto Ricans who have dropped out of Tuley, Wells and Lake View High Schools. It also serves as an alternative for Puerto Rican students who are considering leaving school because of academic or personal problems… Puerto Rican students, parents, and community leaders have long complained that the Chicago public school system is counterproductive and generally apathetic to the real needs of Puerto Rican students. Although the high school was originally established to address the educational needs of its mostly Puerto Rican student body (60/80 students), the school also currently enrolls students of Mexican, African-American and multiple Latino ethnicities from grades 9-12. Currently, the PACHS serves as a “city wide” alternative high school and attracts students from different areas of the city. Because the high school does no formal advertising, most students come to the school by “word of mouth,” as a majority of the students who apply for admission are friends or relatives of current students or alumni. Because the high school wants to maintain a relatively small student body, a waiting list is maintained. At the time of this study, this waiting list contained more than 100 names. Since 1974, the school has been located two miles Northeast of the heart of the Puerto Rican community known as the “Paseo Boricua.” The high school itself is on the second floor of a 2-story building that formerly housed a Walgreen’s photo-developing factory that was purchased by the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. The Puerto Rican Cultural Center is the umbrella organization under which are operated various community-based Puerto Rican agencies including the high school (refer to Ramos-Zayas, 1998). For example, VIDA/SIDA is an organization that provides awareness for HIV/AIDS prevention to the residents of the Puerto Rican community of Chicago. Another example of a PRCC-led community initiative is the Division Street Business Development Association (DSBDA). The DSBDA’s main role is that of encouraging Puerto Ricans to relocate and operate their businesses on Division Street, which is the heart of Puerto Rican Chicago. Hence, the teachers at the PACHS are also part of a larger community organization that works for the cultural, economic and educational interests of the Puerto Rican community of Chicago. As recently as five years ago, this building was nestled in a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood comprised of modest homes and small factories. However, these residents have been forced to find cheaper housing in other areas as the forces of gentrification facilitated by the capital of White, upper class developers have purchased the surrounding factories and converted them into expensive loft apartments attracting young White upper class professionals (refer to Alicea, 2001; Flores-González, 2001; and Ramos-Zayas, 2001 for a more complete analysis of gentrification in Puerto Rican Chicago). According to school supporters, the school is now considered by many of these new residents to be an “eyesore” because the exterior of the school building is covered with a series of painted murals depicting the faces of former and current Puerto Rican political prisoners. Also painted on the high school’s walls are Puerto Rican nationalist slogans, such as “Down with capitalism!”, “Long live a free Puerto Rico!” and “No to colonialism!” Certainly, for me, these murals left no doubt that the school explicitly supported a political ideology: the independence of Puerto Rico from the United States. The basement portion of the building houses the high school’s cafeteria where breakfast and lunch are prepared and served by the school’s teachers and other staff members. The first floor of the building houses the Puerto Rican Cultural Center where many books, articles and historical artifacts centering on Puerto Rican history are found. The high school students and community members at large have access to these resources. The reception area, where visitors are greeted and telephone calls are answered and routed, is also on this floor. The second-floor of the building houses the high school, which consists of six classrooms, two computer labs, an art studio, one large room for the teachers’ office space and the main office where student records are archived. The walls of the classrooms and surrounding spaces are covered with posters and pictures of Puerto Rican, Mexican and African-American historical figures that have been artistically recreated by students and there is a row of student lockers that is painted in the likeness of the Puerto Rican flag. This artwork contributes to the school’s sense of Puerto Ricancentricity while also encouraging the non-Puerto Rican students to celebrate their historical heroes. Funding and Accreditation Although the high school is considered to be an independent private alternative high school, it is funded and accredited by several federal, state and local agencies. For example, the students’ lunches are federally subsidized through the free and reduced lunch program because the majority of the student body comes from families that fall beneath the federal poverty level. State funding, made available through the Title XX and the Illinois State Department of Child and Family Services, is used for the educational services of those students who may come from foster families. Local funding is provided by the City of Chicago, which helps offset the cost of mentoring low income and “at-risk” students. The Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development also disburses funding for student job placement and training. The school also charges students yearly tuition. The students who are ninth or tenth graders are charged $1,750. However, once students reach their junior and senior grades, they become eligible for a variety of scholarships that are made available through private donors. Consequently, a majority of the eleventh and twelfth grade students do not pay the annual tuition. Although the school has funding from these various sources, school officials have to be creative in order to limit their overhead costs. An example of this economic creativity is the fact that the school does not hire a full time janitor or lunchroom staff. Therefore, all of the staff members participate in the school’s maintenance, cleaning and serving of breakfast and lunch to students on a daily rotating schedule. Finally, the school is registered by the Illinois State Board of Education and accredited by the National Association for the Legal Support of Alternative Schools (NALSAS). This accreditation enables the students to receive a regular high school diploma upon graduation. Additionally, the school has a 5-year program with the City of Chicago’s Dual Enrollment Program so that select students, based on grade point average, have the opportunity to take college-level courses and earn credit at a city college while still enrolled at the high school. Administrative/Staff Structure The school’s administrative structure consists of a board of directors and principal that believes Puerto Ricans should lead their own school and community-based agencies. As the high school principal once indicated to me, Whites are not encouraged to assume administrative positions because this type of leadership would only serve to implicitly perpetuate a colonizer/colonized relationship. The board of directors also reviews, revises and legislates school policies. The high school’s board of directors consists of 12 members and is composed of the various directors of Puerto Rican community agencies, business owners, a high school parent and a currently enrolled student. The high school principal is in charge of curricular issues, the implementation of board policies and the general well-being of the school. At the time of this study, the school’s staff consisted of eight teachers, two office workers, two counselors and a grant writer/accountant. A majority of the teaching staff is Puerto Rican, except two White teachers. Educational Philosophy The philosophy of the school reflects its educational mission, which is inherently focused on Puerto Rican pride and affirmation. This philosophy is described in the PACHS teacher manual: This school is bilingual and bicultural because our community speaks both Spanish and English while fighting to maintain Puerto Rican culture. Living within the United States, the Puerto Rican people are pressured into assimilation. Neither our language or [sic] our culture is taught in schools. Our history is even more ignored. The emphasis of bilingual education in public schools has been to ‘mainstream’ — to make Spanish-speaking students learn English. Puerto Rican students are told that their language and culture are impediments to their success. Teachers tell them that they may not speak Spanish in their classes. At this school, we strive to regain our pride in our Puerto Ricaness. By studying their own history and culture, students are able to regain their self-esteem as Puerto Ricans and thus participate fully in their education (p.2) The school’s educational philosophy is also based on the work of Freire (1970) because of its emphasis on the concept of “education as liberation.” This concept encourages students to become agents of social change within the Puerto Rican community. This Freirian-based educational model involves a process by which students are encouraged by their teachers to question those social structures, beliefs or “common-sense” assumptions that serve to perpetuate a status quo and maintain control over its students and/or community members. School documents explicitly address this educational philosophy. To us, education is liberation. By this we mean that education is the development of a thinking human being with the capacity to change his or her environment. Students should take an active role in naming their world and transforming it for the betterment of all. Therefore, we believe education goes far beyond the categories of career, job, and acceptance of the status quo without investigation. To do this, our method is student-centered and based on dialogue. The emphasis is critical thinking — to ask questions and to seek answers. The teacher acts a resource person/facilitator who kindles discussion and assists students in seeking the causes as well as solutions to problems. Much of this work is done with students seated in a circle where students face each other. Students are encouraged to participate that what they say is not right or wrong, but rather the beginning of an analytical process in which they name their world. It is not the role of the teacher to extract answers that he or she wants to hear, but rather to encourage students to investigate and study what they say, so that they can shape their ideas and reach conclusions themselves. The teacher is not the provider pf pre-packaged truth or pre-ordained answers (p. 3). This active social analysis was especially evident in the school when I witnessed much dialogue between students and their facilitators in classes and community-based projects that encouraged students to research and analyze their immediate life circumstances, such as poverty, gang life and police brutality. For instance, I noted how some students helped organize and carry out a protest march regarding police brutality against young Latinas/os. This particular march took place in the immediate Puerto Rican community. However, perhaps the most potent example of this dialogical style of learning/teaching that I witnessed took place during the school’s weekly batey sessions, which was part of the “Unity for Social Analysis” class that all students were required to take for credit. The word batey is the Taíno (the indigenous of Puerto Rico) expression for “meeting area.” The batey is an open space located in the middle of the second floor portion of the building in which the school is housed. Sofas and chairs line the outside perimeters of this space. It is here, within the batey, that the students and teachers would meet on Tuesday and Friday afternoons for one hour. This special space was designed to give students and teachers an opportunity to voice their sentiments on any topic imaginable. This special space was also reserved for student poetry readings and artistic performances. I observed discussions revolving around a wide range of topics, such as the planning of field trips, problems that may have occurred between students and their teachers or fellow classmates during the school week, and discussions around topics such as patriarchy and feminism, gang life and other topics of student interest. The Formal Curriculum The PACHS curriculum is formally divided into three components. They are named the “Identity,” “Cognitive Skills” and “Action” components. The “Identity Component” of the curriculum stresses the importance of students analyzing their social realities as Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, African-Americans or students who may identify themselves as being of multiple Latino ethnicities. This student-based social analysis is done through the offering of Puerto Rican, Mexican and African-American history and literature courses. Most of the teachers utilized multiple texts for their classes. Many of these texts presented topics through an alternative lens. For example, one U.S. history teacher used the work of Howard Zinn in his classes as a supplement to the main textbook that students used in class. Other teachers used texts that specifically addressed African-American and Mexican historical issues. The “Cognitive Skills” component of the high school’s curriculum reflects a more traditional public high school curriculum, which includes Biology, Chemistry, Algebra, Basic Arithmetic, Geometry, Calculus and Trigonometry, among other courses. The third and final component of the curriculum is called “Action” and is implemented through the offering of classes that encourage hands-on student experiences such as photography, art, journalism and video production. Other activities within this component involve student participation in community events such as community protest marches, community clean-ups and cultural events. Consequently, I observed this particular curricular component through my participation with students and teachers in these action-based events. Although students were not obligated to participate in these community events, many of the students who did were praised and given extra credit towards a higher grade in their “Unity for Social Analysis” class. Much creativity was required by PACHS administration and staff in order to maintain the high school’s acquisition of funding sources, accreditation methods and actively engage its students from a Freirian-based curricular format to prepare students for a life of work and/or university studies. For the next phase of this article, I will discuss the school’s role as a sanctuary. School as Sanctuary The students I interviewed theorized the role of the PACHS as a sanctuary because of its caring student-teacher relationships, its familial type environment, its role as a gang-free safe space and the importance that was placed on the affirmation of its students’ racial/ethnic identities. These students tended to view the PACHS as a refuge because it worked to satisfy their affective needs by providing them with several qualities that were indicative of a much more humanistic school environment. Because this type of school environment had been lacking from their previous urban high schools, they felt they had no other choice than to seek a pedagogical alternative. Caring Student-Teacher Relationships Most of the students I spoke with chose to attend the PACHS because of their previous experiences in Chicago’s public high schools with uncaring teachers and the overwhelming presence of gangs. Melissa, a Puerto Rican senior at the PACHS, revealed that many of her public school teachers were uncaring because they had the tendency to stereotype and humiliate her in class. The year I left the public school, they had taken too many students. Most of my teachers cared about the richer and better students. The ones who were poor or at the bottom were ignored. The teachers didn’t care because they put down students and called them names. One time a teacher said that I would become nothing but a future statistic — pregnant or raped somewhere. The White students heard that and started calling me ‘stat.’ I was also the only Puerto Rican in that advanced science class. Things were really bad. I had to get out. Kathy, a multiethnic Latina (Mexican and Puerto Rican) and 1986 PACHS graduate, also spoke about her experiences with uncaring teachers before she decided to enroll at the alternative high school. For her, this uncaring attitude was also complicated by a lack of a Latina/o teacher presence, which translated to having teachers who did not personally know their students and/or who treated them badly. The teachers in my other high school were mean. They would speak down to you. I had no Latino teachers. My teachers didn’t even know my name. If they wanted to get my attention, they would poke at me or yell at me. After a month of this I was like, ‘I’m outta here.’ For Melissa and Kathy, it was |