Reimagining the Future of Learning

     America... The land of some free, home of the slaves. The concept of a history class fosters the notion that everything we learn is in the past and has no effect on us today, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In 1865 the 13th amendment freed the formerly enslaved Black people and ended slave labor, or so they thought. There was a loophole, the amendment allowed for imprisoned people to be forced into labor. While many people opposed slave labor, southerners had built their wealth on the backs of enslaved Black people. Since their wealth was contingent on a newly outlawed system of oppression, they quickly shifted to a new system, the prison system. Soon after the 13th amendment was ratified all sorts of new laws infamously known as "Black Codes" made being Black terribly hard and often times illegal. Black people had to show proof of employment every year or face jail time, and hard taxes were imposed on them that if they failed to pay would result in jail...

      Wealth begets wealth and money is power but we know through the years Black people have been systematically stripped of both their wealth and their power. The average black family holds only one 7th the wealth of the average white family. While explanations for this vary depending on who asked, some may say it's due to a lack of initiative. That the difference is a show of character, but a look at history will reveal the true answer. We hear lots about Abraham Lincoln and how he freed the slaves, but we don't hear about the continuation of Black subjugation that happens right after slavery. After slavery was ended during the reconstruction era many black people were very hopeful, they began electing officials and electing them into office, but every time Black people begin building themselves up there is always someone eager to tear them down.     In 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma was home to Black Wallstreet, one of the wealthiest Black communities in the nation at...

     Race is real but it's a social construct... Race affects our society but it's not real... How does this make any sense? Understanding where race comes from and how it affects society is one of the most important tools in getting rid of racism around the world.  It is often said that "race isn't real" and that "race is just a social construct",  but at the same time, valid claims are made about the effect of racism on people's lives all the time. How can both be true? If race doesn't exist, it would follow that racism doesn't either?  This contradiction may be why it's such a confusing concept for people to grasp, why there are many different ideas of what race is and where it comes from in modern American society. The rift in understanding only serves to perpetuate racism. To comprehend race is to defang the mystical weight it carries, taking away its power.      Race is a recent invention by white supremacy popularized around the 15...

     No one paints the revolutionary war as unjust or mean-spirited. The oppressor was being oppressive so a bloody war took place in the name of freedom. We view those who fought not as violent radicals but as heroes. Many of those heroes owned slaves. one more time as it may need to be repeated, many of those 'heroes' owned slaves... America paints itself as a bastion of freedom, but Black people are always left out of the equation. When Black people do fight for their freedom, it is often thwarted by White America which is why the civil rights movement we know is extremely limited in its political ideologies. We're taught that MLK was nice, Malcolm X was mean, and the Black Panthers were Evil, but none of those statements are true. We need to expand our knowledge of civil rights history and understand that what we know is very whitewashed.       We get a lot wrong about Malcolm X. Rather than try to debate  X's ideas, giving them a chance to be...

     We're taught that the Black Panthers were a violent anti-American Black power group. These ideas couldn't be further than the truth. The Black Panthers did not condone violence rather they promoted self-defense. They saw Black people being treated unjustly and decided if no one would protect Black people they would protect themselves. One of the most controversial methods they used was to approach police detaining Black people and read the Black person their rights while openly carrying firearms to make sure the Black person knew they were safe and that there were witnesses to the injustice Black people had to face at the hands of police. Their goals of Black self-preservation were used against them. The idea that Black people should be able to feel safe in their skin was used to tell White America that the Black Panther Party was a danger to White America. But who was using these lies to talk to White America?      The FBI fervently hated the Black pa...

     The MLK we know is white. What does this mean? The way he is taught, the beliefs he had, and everything we know about him has been whitewashed so he could be a palatable civil rights leader. We grow up in an education system where slavery was bad, Jim crow was bad, then MLK came around and ended racism. This story is very wrong. There are a lot of misconceptions about Martin Luther King. These lies we are taught are disrespectful at best and dangerous at worst. To defang the ideas Martin fought for while he was alive is to strengthen white supremacist narratives in America, giving rise to people who misquote MLK. These people often say things like "that's not what MLK would've wanted" or "this is not what MLK fought for" in the face of blatant racism today. People want to use MLK as justification for passivism in the face of racism. Those people misquoting MLK have no idea of what he actually stood for and because they were never taught.     What was ...

       Existing research regarding my topic can be separated into three main categories. The research I reference in this review consists of related experiments conducted within the last two decades. Each section separates the lens through which the sample experiments were conducted, and how they related directly to my own research. Due to the lack of comparative research between Advanced Placement and dual enrollment through the lens of students of color, current research can be divided into three main sections - analysis of dual enrollment success in students of color, analysis of Advanced Placement success in students of color, and comparison of overall implications of both types of coursework for all students.  Dual Enrollment Success in BIPOC Students Karp & Hughes (2008)  and Swanson (2008)  focus on the benefits and impacts of dual enrollment courses on high school students, believing that dual enrollment is a key factor in increasing colleg...

     I hypothesized that students who preferred dual enrollment courses would perform better overall in both high school and post-secondary academic settings over students that preferred Advanced Placement courses due to the guaranteed credit options, ease of enrolling, and less rigid structure. My prediction that students preferring dual-enrollment would perform better in high school was shown to be correct in the data since students that preferred dual enrollment coursework had higher overall grade-point averages than students that preferred Advanced Placement. However, there was no statistically significant evidence proving either dual enrollment or Advanced Placement better prepared students for post-secondary academic success.       Since the respondents of the survey that preferred both the Advanced Placement and dual enrollment side had fairly uniform grades, the correlation between academic achievement and types of higher-level coursework demon...

     In the United States, the two largest programs that allow high school students to receive college credit are the Advanced Placement program from the College Board, and dual enrollment credit courses provided to public schools by local community colleges and universities. Students of color are consistently left behind within academic spaces, and often pushed out of and not encouraged to enroll in higher-level courses. However, with the recent push to make academic spaces more equitable and representative for students of color, educators are working to better understand their students and their needs. By finding out which of the two options is most equitable, representative, and beneficial in the long-term, schools are able to understand which programs to invest in and how to best support their students of color. This led to my research question: Does Advanced Placement or Dual Enrollment coursework better prepare BIPOC students for post-secondary academic success? To ...

Throughout my education, I have been extremely interested in Black history and Black studies. My great grandfather was a Black cowboy, and thus a member of an infamous group in history who helped shape this nation, but a history that not many people know about. Now his son, my grandfather, grew up in the deep South amidst segregation and extremely blatant racism, and then in his young adult life, went on to fight in the Vietnam War, which was the first American war in which the army was desegregated. It was with this in mind that I started doing my own research about Black history, reading all kinds of works related to different topics. But one thing I realized almost immediately, was the lack of intersectionality between the topics I was learning. As I was reading I would find myself “going down the rabbit hole” of Black history, looking up people and events I had never heard about before. As I was doing this, I realized that each historical event, scholar, and activist was connected,...

Sudan has approximately 34.5 million people from as many as 400 different ethnic groups. The North is dominated by Arabic-speaking Muslims. In the South, at least 100 different languages are spoken, and most southern Sudanese follow indigenous beliefs or have become Christians. Each major ethnic group and historical region has its own special forms of cultural expression. Feminism In the 2019 Sudanese Revolution to oust then-President Omar al-Bashir,  women led the way. One 22-year-old student, Alaa Salah, became a symbol of the revolution and feminism in Sudan after a photo of her leading protests went viral. 70% of the protestors in the revolution were women, Historically, Sudanese authorities have silenced women's rights activists with threats of libel and rape; some women had their heads forcibly shaved, were forced to take off their clothes, then photographed, insulted, taken to jail, beaten, and "treated in a way no Sudanese girl should be treated".  However, in sha...

 Angela Davis is an American political activist, philosopher, academic, and author. Beyond these titles, she is a Black woman and member of the LGBTQ+ community. The work of Angela Davis analyzes and discusses topics on race, gender, and class in relation to capitalism, the prison industrial complex, politics, and more. Angela Davis has been a long-time radical figure in all of these movements, despite the fact that she is hardly ever taught as such. Her life experiences have drastically impacted her critical analysis of society as she and the world have changed over the years.  One of the major shifts in Davis' political life was the year 1968. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, there was an emergence of 'feminist consciousness, and intersections between feminism, communism, racism, and sexism. According to Davis, they truly believed that the revolution was right around the corner at this time. In a global context, the African Liberation Revolution, the Cuban R...

One of the core things we learn in high school English classes is how to analyze texts for themes, literary techniques, and characterization. While these things are important skills for students to learn and develop critical reading and writing skills, there are also other ways of analysis that could help students beyond the classroom in any aspect of life. This is the skill of critical thinking. Last semester, I took a course called Philosophy and Critical Thinking through the University of Queensland. At the end of the course, I read supplemental resources from the course relating to a project through the university working to establish ore critical thinking and philosophy methods in education. This semester, since I was focusing more on independent research, I used the things I learned in my studies of philosophy and critical thinking to adjust how I did my research and actively practice critical thinking. The bulk of my research this semester has been focused on Black studies, with...

Throughout high school, I have taken accelerated and AP classes at Roosevelt and Central Academy. One of the things that has always been an issue with these classes, especially at Roosevelt, is that the student population of these classes is not entirely representative of the student body i.e., the classes are majority white, while the student population is nearly 50/50 BIPoC and white students. However, in the 2020-2021 school year when classes got switched to virtual and we as DMPS students became one larger student body, the core demographics and structures of the classes changed. This year, only one of my AP teachers was actually from Roosevelt High School, the other two I had (besides Central) were from North and East, respectively. In these new virtual comprehensive classes, one of the most significant differences I noticed was that there were actually a lot more BIPoC students in them. Even without having our cameras on or really fully knowing each other, by the profile pictures...