As much as new information technologies open research and reporting vistas for what children can investigate and document about the world, the thornier and more urgent our questions and criteria must become as to what makes for sound inquiry. The answer has to do with alchemy and how the combination of certain precious ingredients can have a formative effect of bringing out the curious, the diligent, the inquiring, the researcher, the writer, the scientist, and the poet in urban youth. The other participants came from a cluster of alternative high schools in the New York area. The answer, seven years later, is that the same 14 year old who grew up on 125th and Broadway, after four years at the Academy and two as a peer counselor, went on to Mount Holyoke College and is in the third year of a pre-med. program. More than 100 of her peers who attended the academy have gone on to post-secondary education.
High expectations enrich and challenge.
Curricular practices that prescribe excellence and diligence strike chords of recognition with urban youth. The Environmental Science Academy was erected on five pedagogical building blocks. Total immersion in a culture of high expectations and rigor. Last summer we introduced the Internet, e-mail, and the World Wide Web were introduced. Although it was alternately exhilarating and confounding, the new technology marked a simultaneous departure and arrival of the Academy into a new world, one in which communication and our notions of science, English, and the production and acquisition of knowledge would be forever altered.