Artistically Asking About School: Picturing City Youth as Writers, Artists, and Citizens

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

Abstract

Over our multiple decades working with urban youth as literacy and arts educators, we have heard innumerable students’ complaints about the irrelevance of school and its assignments. While we initially dismissed these laments, we now appreciate these grievances represent cause for concern about the tacit agreements around schooling that must exist if youth are to engage with our classes (Balfantz & Legters, 2004). In the city settings where we have worked—including Cleveland, New York, and Washington, DC—high school dropout (or “pushout”) rates have registered at a minimum of 40% for the past half century (Children’s Defense Fund, 2008). These youths’ persistent complaints echo their community members’ multi-generational disengagement from school (Fredricks, Blumenfeld & Paris, 2004).
But these dropout statistics do not suggest the causes of or the solutions to these embedded relationships to school. Nor do they make sense of the challenges to the social contract, which serves as the foundation of these relationships (Erickson, et al, 2007). In what follows, we discuss how—using arts-based methods—we have paid attention to this contract, questions of the role of school in urban students’ lives, and ways students learn to reject their educational institutions (Easton & Condon, 2009). We cannot assume students will ever know a positive relationship to school; this multi-generational rejection requires us to approach our pedagogies and the very institution of school with a critical perspective. While we exhibit faith in this social contract of schooling, in response to students’ laments we now begin with the question of the importance of school rather than a supposition of its value (Beuschel, 2008).

Authors

• Kristien Zenkov, George Mason University

• Kimberly Marie Sheridan, George Mason University