The Ase Academy at the University of Pennsylvania

Posted by on July 29, 2011

An Interview With Brian Peterson

For more information contact: http://www.aseacademy.org/contact/

In 1999, the Ase Academy (pronounced ah-shay) formed as a college student response to the multiplicity of issues faced by under-served young people in West Philadelphia, and a lack of access or support for those students in pursuing higher education. Ase began as a Saturday enrichment program for local 6th and 7th grade students, predominantly from West Philadelphia public schools. Currently, students from all over Philadelphia and a few students from New Jersey attend the Ase Academy. Ase curricula focuses on African-centered academic, culture and arts programming. All of the curricula and all of the classes are run and designed by Penn students.

Mr. Peterson began his career at the University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate student of engineering. As an undergrad Mr. Peterson became involved with tutoring and mentoring programs at the W.E.B DuBois House at Penn, which caused him to change his career path and pursue a Masters in Education in high-school math, while continuing to work with and mentor Penn students. Mr. Peterson is now completing a PhD in Education, Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. Throughout his career the Ase Academy has focused his work and provided a lens through which to promote culturally relevant education.

Q: How did the Ase Academy develop?

A: I found my voice and passion by being involved in leadership programs at the DuBois House and in the engineering program. I was the president of National Society of Black Engineers chapter at Penn and I was doing a lot of tutoring and mentoring in West Philadelphia, and my mom was a teacher. I was seeing all this need [with young people in West Philadelphia], and I had never personally had a black male teacher until I was in graduate school, and many other African American students at Penn felt the same way.

The reason for creating Ase wasn’t all necessarily directly about academic “education”. Ase was built on giving middle school students in Philadelphia a wider vision of what they could do and why research and higher education were important.

Ase also gave undergraduate students who were passionate about this work a voice. I’ve supported undergrads who came to Penn wanting to be I-Bankers and instead doing Teach for America, or becoming those I-Bankers but staying active in Ase and using that space to be a teacher and a leader for young people.

Q: What’s important about an Ase education?

A: The middle school students in our program may write and produce their own creative work, but they also learn to connect it to research and the history of the medium they’re exploring. It was phenomenal some of the work that was done, by both undergraduate at middle school students. I was teaching an Ase seminar in the summer and we were reading DuBois, at 10AM on a Saturday morning (who else does that??) and the students were really getting it. They began making connections to another reading we did about a school walk-out that happened twenty years ago. We gave them the space to question their education system, and to ask why we’re still struggling with a lot of the same problems we were 100 years ago.

Q: How did you structure the Ase program, and why did you focus on middle school students?

A: 6th and 7th grade was what we started with, but students who graduated in to 8th grade wanted to come back, so we turned it in to a cohort and this year we graduated our first seniors from high-school. But we wanted to focus on middle-school because there’s so much for high-school students already and not as much for that middle-school age group.

We operate partially out of DuBois house on campus and our staff is mostly work study students through the Netter Center for Community Partnerships. Middle-schoolers attend classes on Saturdays throughout the year and all Ase students have a Penn student as a mentor. The Ase mentors and teachers are a small and dedicated group, but we also connect with lots of other groups on campus to provide enrichment activities for students like African drum and dance.

I also teach an Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) course called Culturally Relevant Teaching and Learning. This class is listed under the urban education minor and is a small seminar. Many students who do Ase also take this course. In the class we mostly look at innovative ways of engaging in urban education, using culture as an asset rather than the deficit model often incorporated into schooling. Students work to understand themselves first. The class also gives them the skills to look at cultures that are different from their own. The class is a vibrant and free flowing experience to explore these themes.

Q: Are your students all from West Philadelphia schools?

A: Some are from neighborhood schools, and those students attend because they want to challenge themselves academically. Some students may come from Masterman and live in the suburbs but their parents want them to be connected to the culture built at Ase. We have students from New Jersey…the biggest requirement is that the student wants to be at Ase. Ase is not a program for those few “A” students, it’s really about commitment to what we’re doing.

Q: What is the future of Ase, and could this model be replicated in other schools?

A: Currently we’re focusing on how to define the “model”. We will be strategically documenting the work that students do in order to better understand the impact of the program. We eventually want to replicate the program and partner with others interested in our youth enrichment model, but we first want to be clear on how everything works. We’ve been doing Ase since 1999 but no two years have been the same. Now we’re really trying to key in on what makes Ase unique and successful, and nurture that core into something greater.

I am also focusing my research on college completion skills, and in helping students develop them. For example, instead of using the Internet and new media to go on myspace or facebook, we can show students videos of young black entrepreneurs that are doing all kinds of amazing work and that begins to get students to a place where they think, “I can do that too.” Kids don’t have low self-esteem, they just can’t always see the options. Young people need to be called “scholars”. They need to be affirmed, to know that their skills matter and Ase provides that. The best thing you can do in life is to harness your gift and give it to others. I like working with university students, because if I can guide ten, I know they will change the lives of ten more middle school students and then we’ve reached 100 students, and the impact just continues to grow.