Artful Cityscapes: Transforming Urban Education With Art

• In Event: Transforming City Schools Through Art: Approaches to Meaningful K-12 Learning

Abstract

What would it take to change prevalent narratives about urban education? How can educators, scholars, researchers and communities engage in successfully reimagining urban schools as sites of joyful, artful, and effective learning? What is at stake when we radically consider the impact of urban schools in a society? These questions underscore a transformative framework for participating in personal, public and professional debates concerning the possibilities of education in cities and the role of education in contributing to sustainable and socially just contemporary societies. This chapter has a twin focus. It assumes that (a) sustainable communities require vibrant, resourced, and interconnected educational systems, and (b) artistic practices are effective catalysts in promoting meaningful relationships that result in articulating participants’ voices, creating a sense of place, and promoting opportunities for reflection and transformation in our cities.
Progressively, the term urban is less-utilized as a geographical or physical location descriptor, and more often used as a social and cultural construct pertaining to certain people and places, particularly poor and non-White (Noguera, 2003). In the United States, for example, the majority of students attending city schools are underserved children of color. They find themselves in an environment that is prone to greater levels of regimentation more commonly associated with high-control institutions, such as penitentiaries. Activist scholars vociferously denounce this school-to prison pipeline as the result of schools’ increased militarization and regimentation (Lipman, 2006), and identify as primary targets under-resourced schools and districts where students have “inadequate exposure to the arts” (Kim, Losen, & Hewitt, 2010).
As educators develop metaphors to better understand our practices (Jeffers, 1990), we notice that a rhetoric of education as scientific intervention, intended to shape and model students into externally determined end products, bears more affinity to urban school practices than, for example, a growth metaphor that considers the student/child as a plant or flower and the teacher and school as a garden. In this more bucolic, agrarian, and child-centered view (Scheffler, 1965), students are nurtured so that their potentialities may blossom with teachers and schools providing optimal conditions to nurture and assist without much interference with natural development. In fact, many serious issues in contemporary education relate to the prevalence of an industrial, mechanistic and quasi-scientific model indiscriminately applied to contemporary post-industrial contexts. Many educational developments, policies, and strategies still in use today originated in response to the educational needs of preparing skilled workers for factories at the turn of the past century. However, as Sir Ken Robinson advocates, in order to find answers to today’s problems, contemporary society places a high premium on innovation, creativity and the ability to articulate meaning from everyday experiences (cited in Azzam, 2009). Unfortunately, these competencies ordinarily take a back seat in public urban education. Therefore, the divide between students entitled to enriching educational experiences that honor complex skills and abilities, such as those associated with the arts, and students who suffer the increasing standardization and regimentation of public schools grows everyday. This gap affirms education’s role as society’s sorting device.

Author

• Flavia M. C. Bastos, University of Cincinnati