Blue Heart had the opportunity to attend the San Diego Association of African-American Educators (AAAE) Youth Conference on the University of San Diego campus learning about professionalism, code switching, priority career sectors such as science, technology, and engineering, plus the history of HBCUs and prominent African-American educators from the past who still influence education today.
STEAM Education encourages young natural scientists and promoted critical thinking. By actively engaging in learning about their surroundings. It has been shown Active learning leads to increases in examination performance that can raise average grades within the STEM fields by a half a letter. Educators encouraged this type of engagement to remain critical thinkers and interested in the sciences. On this day there was a Q & A with our students touching on opportunities in education as well as STEM based careers.
Painful as some of these experiences were, I was grateful to have them in middle school and high school, so that when the time came to head for college, I already had some fluency navigating between different cultures (to make life even more interesting, I had a small crew of Latino friends from my hometown who I also spent time with in college, enjoying getting to know another group who were so much like young, African-Americans in some ways and so different in others).
I watched as too many others from my hometown and other predominantly black cities struggled in a university setting where suddenly they really were a minority.
For these kids, being members of a minority group was an abstraction, because everywhere they turned in their own lives — from school to the corner store and their own street corners — they were surrounded by others who looked and acted like them. (I used to tell my private-school classmates that, before I joined their world, the only time I saw white people outside of a department store or gas station was when they got lost driving through my neighborhood.)
But once these students left those mostly black neighborhoods for top colleges such as Indiana University, Purdue University or Notre Dame, they were suddenly surrounded by a culture they hadn’t experienced firsthand. On top of the normal pressures of leaving home and family to take on a ramped-up academic challenge, they had to learn how to navigate white social structures while retaining their own sense of what it meant to be black.
I learned early on, thanks to that g-word nonsense, that expertly navigating another culture wasn’t a rejection of where I’d come from or a signal that I was any less authentically black. And returning to my roots wasn’t being phony or perpetrating a put-on.
It was being fully who I am. This is a lesson too many other young people from too many other cultures have to learn the hard way — making their way in an American culture that too often still demands assimilation or marginalization.
As more cultures join America’s melting pot, that’s why code-switching remains so valuable.
