The Field Trip
Spanish teachers have a reputation in the education field — while being sticklers for grammar and formality, they are the only staff able to justify screenings of Encanto and mid-class meals of fried plantains. Mine were right to make this constant connection to Latino culture as many students never left the cornfields and cauldesacs of Lancaster County. My alma mater’s Spanish teachers had the idea to take the class to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit. As I forged a signature on the permission slip, I didn’t know my life would change forever.
Our luxury tour bus showed up near the Rocky statue to transport us to what the world language educator described as an “authentic Spanish lunch” after the museum visit. We had spent a few hours milling around the long halls, avoiding the educator-chaperones, and devising trips to the snack bar. (I hate to admit that I don’t recall any of Kahlo’s paintings.) We started the trip upward northward… As the cross-streets increasingly duplicated the state’s counties, Susquehanna, Lehigh, and the Allegheny, I watched the educators’ eyebrows furrow deep and deeper in a worried frown. It wasn’t the city’s tight cross streets that provoked the teachers to worry, instead it was the startling realization that she was responsible for fifty sheltered, suburban students in the middle of North Philadelphia. For they indeed had chosen an authentic culinary experience in the middle of an equally authentic North Philadelphia neighborhood…
Two agitated educators jumped off the bus, convinced that this was “not the right place”. In the middle of their chest palpitations, I could see them counting student heads and the digits in their pension accounts. Surely the bus driver had just taken the shortcut through the rough neighborhood to reach the wrong destination. But it was it. To their shock, the so-called restaurant in the middle of Hunting Park was also a club. It was too late… the baskets of empanadas had already been ordered and district had already signed off on the itinerary.
We marched single file into the club, looking wondrously at the advertisements for salsa and meringue nights. We were ushered in a corner that partly blocked the view of the bar. Parent-chaperones stood around the tables full of rice and plantains looking down at us as we nibbled on concoctions of starch and Adobo seasoning. Looking back, I now realize that they were guarding the doorway and trying to prevent any North Philadelphia infiltration to their nightmarish field trip. This was Hunting Park. If a chaperone had a smartphone at that time, they would learn that Hunting Park was one of the poorest communities in Philadelphia. At the time, the vibrant community was struggling with violence. Philadelphia drug lord Kaboni Savage was from the neighborhood and had been in the news for the recently firebombing witnesses. A few years before, Ibram X. Kendi had lived not far from the restaurant while attending nearby Temple University. Other online sources may have noted the high unemployment rate or the neighborhood greenhouse effect.
Nothing happened other than a few headaches from the combination of MSG-laden rice and old fryer oil. Sure, one student left to get marijuana under the guise of picking up aspirin at CVS… but marijuana wasn’t being laced with fentanyl yet. Seated with my English textbook, I felt strangely at home in the tight boulevards as neighbors spent the warm afternoon “stooping” on their front porches. The year was 2008 and Daddy Yankee’s “Somos De Calle” filled the car stereos with reminders of “Tú sabes que somos de calle, hay cría y corazón” (You know that we’re from the street, there’s (cria) and heart, feel the fire”). Jane Jacob’s research on effective urban placemaking characterized the neighborhood well, “The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity.” Families walked to baseball games in nearby Fairmount Park, bartered at impromptu flea markets, and walked 5th Street’s multiplicity of stores. I hated that tour bus. I knew what awaited me a Pennsylvania Turnpike ride away — days of suburban gloom and silent nights. As I we passed by the bodegas and later, the city’s esteemed Boathouse Row, I couldn’t help but feel like I had finally found home.
A decade later, I found myself in the neighborhood as an urban educator in North Philadelphia. As if by fate, I took a position in the neighborhood’s high school as an English Language Arts teacher after graduating from Temple University. That two years would forever shape my trajectory as an urban educator in the city. I would share in valuable lessons that would continue to shape and mold me not only as an educator, but as a person. A colleague taught me the importance of a soft heart with a strong mind. My students taught me tenacity and grit. The physical school structure itself would propel me into study and advocacy for educational equity. Incidentally, I would go back to that restaurant over and over again with colleagues as we talked about student experiences over rice and plantains. My husband would later work right across from it. This was home. The field trip brought me home.
I think about this beloved neighborhood quite often as an educator. As I write my objectives on the board, I am identifying what outcomes I want students to know. However, when I reflect on the intersection between lived experience and pedagogy, I realize that the most important experiences and lessons that have shaped me were not scripted in the lesson. No, the most important one took place by chance and fate… in a tour bus headed to North Philadelphia. They happened because of our space in place.
