Toward the School as Sanctuary Concept in Multicultural Urban Education: Implications for Small High School Reform

Abstract

This article describes the school as sanctuary concept through the voices of students enrolled in a small urban high school that curricularly privileges the linguistic, cultural, and sociopolitical realities of its communities. Moreover, this particular school was founded by students and teachers over 30 years ago as a direct response to pedagogically and psychologically colonizing large comprehensive high schools in a major urban school district. According to students, a school becomes a sanctuary when there are four essential components in place. These sanctuary-like attributes include multiple definitions of caring relations between students and their teachers, the importance of a familial-like school environment, the necessity of psychologically and physically safe school spaces, and allowing students a forum in which they are encouraged to affirm their racial/ethnic pride. Implications for forwarding this concept within a larger discourse around urban school reform are discussed.

The Social Context of School Success for Latino Middle School Students

“…This has been reported for students from all race and ethnicity groups (e. g., Rosenfeld, Richman, & Bowen, 2000;Scrimsher & Trudge, 2003;Wentzel, 1999;Woolley & Grogan-Kaylor, 2006). Some studies have shown that supportive teachers are a key relationship with respect to school outcomes for ethnic-and racial-minority students (Antrop- González, 2006;Johns, 2001). For example, in a recent study of 226 Latino youth from an urban middle school, Garcia-Reid et al (2005) reported that teacher support had the highest impact on school engagement in a model including measures of support from parents, friends, and neighborhood adults.…”

An Examination of Student Perceptions of Regional Safe School and Public School Services

“…As Zach said, emphasizing the importance of his relationships with teachers, "This school has saved lives before." (Zach, January 4, 2011) This study reinforces the idea that authentic caring is important to urban students of color (Alder, 2002;Antrop-Gonzalez, 2006;Antrop-Gonzalez & De Jesus, 2006).…”

“…Four of these students were African American. According to Antrop-Gonzalez (2006), a school becomes a sanctuary when there are caring relationships between students and teachers, a family-like environment, psychologically and physically safe spaces, and a forum to affirm their racial or ethnic pride. In the interviews that were part of the current study, students identified all but the last of these as being important elements of their experiences at Hope.…”

Experiences of Latina/o Students in Large Schools in Drag: A Critical Analysis of an Urban Alternative High School

“…Therefore, the purpose of this study is to describe the schooling experiences of Latina/o students enrolled in a small, charter school located in a Midwestern urban center. Moreover, while recent scholarship has highlighted the extent to which some small urban schools have created cultures of sanctuary, critical care, and healthy learning environments (Antrop-González & De Jesús, 2006;Antrop-González, 2006), this study and its findings are important because we describe student voices around the extent to which small size alone does not necessarily equate to the fostering of healthy educational environments and/or cultures of high academic achievement. On the contrary, some small schools have the unfortunate potential of being large schools in drag (Fine, 2005); namely, small schools that possess the same toxic cultures of academic underachievement and low academic expectations as their large high school counterparts.…”