Teoma Galloway, a junior in the International Baccalaureate at Pittsburgh Schenley High School, had to add a foreign language to her schedule last year and chose Russian over Japanese.

Her choice, said Teoma, 16, was not out of affinity for Russian. In fact, it was born of indifference for either language.

But after a year of immersion in Russian language, history and culture, Teoma contends that she has come to realize what was a seemingly alien language, may well be a key that opens doors for her to a world beyond Pittsburgh someday.

For Teoma and the group of 10 Schenley students-- four seniors and six juniors-- who recently met for an hour-long discussion with a visiting Russian scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, that realization now encapsulates a broader sense of why mastering a foreign language in high school and beyond, matters.

"It is good to know that it's about more than learning a language. We now have a sense of the possibilities and career opportunities that we can pursue because of studying Russian," said Kalyn Flournoy, 17, a senior at Schenley.

Two years after Russian was re-introduced in the world languages program of the Pittsburgh Public Schools -- with the International Baccalaureate at Schenley being the only program that currently offers Russian -- teachers and administrators say that what is especially remarkable is the number of African-American students enrolling to learn the language and study the culture.

"It's really exciting to see how the students are taking to it," said Marsha Plotkin, supervisor of the foreign languages curriculum in the city schools.

Seated around a conference table at the Pitt Center for Russian and East European Studies on a recent Wednesday morning, the group of mostly African-American students listened intently as Sunnie Rucker-Chang, also an African American, explained how the study of Russian and Slavic culture influenced her life.

"I fell in love with Russian at about the same age as all of you," Ms. Rucker-Chang, outreach coordinator for the Center for Slavic and East European Studies at Ohio State University, told the group.

"I travelled and studied in Russia by the age of 17. In college, I paid my living expenses as a Russian interpreter at a hospital, and now I am studying the language and culture that I have been fascinated with for a long time," said Ms. Rucker-Chang, who engaged with the students in a short exchange in Russian.

A doctoral candidate at Ohio State, where she will soon defend a thesis on contemporary Serbian identity, Ms. Rucker-Chang painted a picture of the career paths and opportunities available to scholars of Russian language and culture.

"If nothing else, I hope I can show you how the study of Russian may be an important aspect of your education and how it may help you build a career someday," said Ms. Rucker-Chang.

She gave the students a pamphlet with a primer on the careers they could pursue with a grounding in Russian -- from teaching to the foreign service, military service and government and non-government organizations like the United Nations among others.

First introduced in Pittsburgh Public Schools in the 1970s during the Cold War, Russian was eliminated from world languages curriculum soon after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s said Ms. Plotkin.

But with the re-emergence of Russia's economy and its geopolitical dominance in the last decade or so, the federal government declared Russian -- currently classified as a "less commonly taught language" -- as a critical language.

In other words, there is a need for more Americans to take up Russian language and cultural studies like they once did at the height of the Cold War.

Ms. Rucker-Chang said she hopes the re-emphasis on Russian language studies will draw more African-American students to the field where they are disproportionately under-represented.

"I go to Russian studies conferences all the time where I am often the only African-American scholar and I hope we can begin to change that," she said.

In the Pittsburgh schools, the Pitt Center for Russian and East European Studies "has been incredible in helping us bring back Russian into the curriculum," said Ms. Plotkin.

"Our hope is that we can inspire students to pursue Russian language and studies by exposing them to scholars, especially African-American scholars, who can share their experience of Russian language and culture," said Gina Peirce, assistant director of the Pitt center.

But even if they don't study Russian, Leslie Ann Smedley, a senior adviser in the Pitt Study Abroad Office encouraged the students to study a foreign language and even consider spending a semester abroad, if only to expand their worldview.

"I only speak French, Spanish and German," said Ms. Smedley, adding that she was drawn to foreign languages as a student at Pittsburgh Peabody High School.

"I am a proud graduate of the Pittsburgh Public Schools and the best thing I ever did was take French when I was at Peabody," she said.

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