About three-quarters of Peekskill High School (PHS) graduates attend college, which is in no small part due to Jodi Fernandez, an English teacher at the school for the past 18 years. She teaches not one but two college courses. It was her innovation and drive that led to the creation of the first college course ever to be offered at PHS. She also teaches a class on hip-hop, from which she draws inspiration to innovate in her own life.
To know hip-hop is to know the immigrant experience, at least according to Fernandez.
Fernandez started teaching “Introduction to Hip-Hop Studies” at Peekskill High School in 2022, to demonstrate that hip-hop should be regarded as a legitimate art form. Hip-hop emerged in the 1970s in New York City, a genre and culture founded by immigrants.
Fernandez always found comfort in hip-hop. Her love for the genre only got stronger as she got older. In 2021, at the suggestion of a former student, Fernandez began searching for ways to incorporate hip-hop into her teaching.
In “Introduction to Hip-Hop Studies,” students get to learn about hip hop as a cultural movement, its origins, and its impact on society. Fernandez says she’s received positive feedback from students in her two years of teaching the course. Fernandez currently teaches three hip-hop courses: two college and one high school English version.
“They really are into it, because it is a course where I’m teaching the history of the Bronx. I’m teaching the history of New York City. I’m teaching the immigrant experience as it relates to hip-hop, because two of the three of the founders of hip-hop are immigrants themselves.”
Peekskill High School alumna Ariana Okoth says Fernandez’s class was especially important during her stressful senior year. “It was the one class that I could count on to learn and also feel safe and have fun. It was just phenomenal,” said Okoth, valedictorian of the class of 2024.
When asked during her college interviews what her favorite course was, Okoth said she always answered, “Hip-hop.”
A Deeper Appreciation of the African Diaspora
Creating the hip-hop course was not the first time Fernandez crafted an innovative curriculum. She redesigned the high school’s African Diaspora course to delve further into the history of the first human migrations around the world. In doing so, she created the first college course at Peekskill High School, allowing high school students to earn college credits.
In 2008, a year after being hired, Fernandez was assigned to teach an African Diaspora course. However, she realized that the course did not actually dive into African and African-American history.
“It was all Martin Luther King, civil rights, and it just started there and sort of ended with the Reagan and the crack era.”
Dissatisfied with the course material, Fernandez rewrote the course to have a focus on how, when, and why humans from Africa moved around the world.
After a few years of teaching the revised course, Fernandez submitted her course to SUNY Albany’s “University in the High School” program. In 2015, SUNY Albany approved African Diaspora as a college course, the first the high school ever offered. In 2023, based on the depth of the course material, SUNY Albany also approved “Introduction to Hip-Hop Studies” as a college course.
Fernandez has encountered criticism for teaching the African Diaspora course. “I’ve received pushback from parents saying that I taught too much about race. I’ve also faced pushback from students saying that I was flat-out wrong,” she added.
When discussing segregation, racial discrimination, or other topics for which she has encountered that pushback, Fernandez says she has one rule: “I just present the facts. You really can’t argue with facts. While we can have differences of opinions, the facts are the facts. You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to even think about it, but it’s a fact.”
Fernandez says her students’ favorite part of her course is Real Talk Fridays, which she started in 2008. “Real Talk Fridays” is a spin on the traditional socratic seminar, in which classes participate in student-led seminars. All discussion topics are chosen by students. During Real Talk Fridays, students receive grades in real-time based on their participation. “The point is to get to a level of enlightenment,” says Fernandez.
In 2018, Fernandez searched for ways to inform the larger school population about the history and context her African Diaspora students had been learning for years. She decided to use the arts or, “edutainment” (education through entertainment), and hold performances out of the high school auditorium.
With her students, Fernandez produced “Black Lives Matter” (2018),“Rise Up” (2019), “Melanin Magic” (2020 & 2021) and “Diasporic Dreams.”
Collabing with Her Students
After the pandemic started in 2020, Fernandez collaborated with New Era Creative Space to search for ways to produce art in a time when everyone had to follow social distancing rules. With the help of Ariana Okoth and several other students, the organization produced “Melanin Magic.”
Fernandez would go on to be an integral part of Okoth’s academic journey, mentoring her throughout high school. In her senior year, Okoth took a course with Fernandez. She recalled being surprised by how Fernandez conducted her classroom.
“She set expectations of what the real world would look like.” Okoth said she appreciated how Fernandez always emphasized the importance of accountability, unlike other teachers she’s had.
In addition, Okoth said students enjoyed that Fernandez was passionate about the course material she presented. “It was great because she cares about what she teaches. Most of the time it’s because she’s designed it herself, so it’s easy to engage in her class and actually care about her class, because she clearly does.”
One memory Okoth will cherish forever was when she and Fernandez celebrated Okoth’s acceptance to Harvard University.
Recalling this moment, Okoth said, “She told me that she knew there would be a lot of spaces that I would be entering in college where I would feel unwelcomed or that I don’t belong. She assured me that I do belong and that I deserve to hold space. As a young black girl who is sometimes the only person of color in the classes that I’m taking, I’ve truly cherished her advice.”
Teaching Found Her
While Fernandez is passionate about education, there was a time when she was indecisive about what field she should pursue. Unlike many teachers who tell their students they always knew they wanted to become a teacher, Fernandez says not in her case. Teaching found her.
Born in the late 1970s, Fernandez was raised in a housing development in the Bronx in the ’80s, when the crack epidemic was at its worst. “Everybody’s parents, uncles, older brothers, including my older brothers, were all addicted to crack cocaine.”
At a young age, Fernandez assumed many family responsibilities. She often babysat her younger siblings when she was seven years old. A typical morning for Fernandez consisted of her running with her siblings in hand, dodging all the chaos around her, to drop them off at Pre-K before heading to second grade herself.
Yet, Fernandez did have one advantage: she was a naturally intelligent scholar and had been placed in accelerated classes at school.
As a junior, Fernandez began to explore post-secondary opportunities. Due to the lack of financial assistance from her family, Fernandez’s choices were limited.
Though she was accepted into the Wood Tobe-Coburn fashion school in New York City, Fernandez’s time there was short-lived. “I just couldn’t afford it. I literally got kicked out of class one day because I was trying to pay it on my own and at the time, I was 19,” she recalled.
Fernandez bounced around from job to job in her early twenties, searching for a profession she could settle on and succeed in. Ultimately, it was a casual suggestion from a friend, which got Fernandez’s foot in the education door.
Eighteen years later, Fernandez can still recall the exact moment she knew she wanted to become a teacher. “I remember subbing [for] this fifth grade class. They wore me out. They were just rambunctious. They were giving me all kinds of attitude, asking me – is your leather jacket real? They were so mean, but at the end of the day, they were like, ‘Are you coming back?’ And I wanted to come back.”
Fernandez says she found the education field challenging at first, but she was motivated to succeed. “It was the one thing that was hard that I wanted to do again.”
In 2006, Fernandez was hired as a full-time teacher in the Peekskill district, where immediately felt at home.
“Once I got here, I saw all these brown and black kids. I didn’t think it was going to be such a diverse school.”
Here was an immigrant population, reminiscent of what Fernandez had known and loved in the Bronx, primed for the innovative content and teaching style Fernandez would become renowned for.
In a sense, Fernandez and Peekskill students were made for each other.
Daring to Dream Big
Fernandez usually lives by the motto, “never give up on your dreams.” That is what she preaches to her students. However, Fernandez is guilty of giving up at one time in her life.
When she was younger, Fernandez wanted to pursue a career in writing. She tried but it wasn’t until she actually edited a book for a colleague that Fernandez began to work towards her dream. “One day, I was talking to my therapist and telling her what I was doing. She was like, ‘How dare you do something for someone else that you wouldn’t do for yourself!’ I promise you after that session the first four chapters came out of me,” recalled Fernandez.
Fernandez got straight to work and in 2022, she published her first memoir called “Elevators: A Bronx Girl’s Tale.”
This month, Fernandez has released a second memoir called “Ordered Steps: An Unorthodox Educator’s Ascension Story”. Both memoirs are available on Amazon.
While teaching will always be a part of Fernandez’s life, Fernandez hopes to transition into writing full-time when she leaves Peekskill High School.
Only time will tell what’s to come for Fernandez, but if her past achievements suggest anything, it will likely be innovative.
