Picturing Place: Youth Reflections on Participatory Art-Making

• In Event: 66.046 - Diverse Approaches to Critical Pedagogies of Place in Urban Environmental Education

Abstract

This research explores the environmental perspectives and multiple literacies (including ecological, visual, and technological literacies) of youth who engage in visual storytelling and participatory documentary media making through an informal, arts-based, non profit organization located in the Westside region of Los Angeles. The organization, founded in 1993, offers photography, filmmaking, comics, animation, writing, and visual arts classes primarily to low-income youth in Los Angeles, while also serving as a hub for public programs, exhibitions, and artistic community. Over 400 youth are served annually in afterschool and weekend art mentoring and education classes that are free to families who can provide proof of public benefits or low income status.

While the Westside’s geographic location and contemporary economic and cultural activity help sustain the mytho-poetic “California Dream” of sunny beaches, excellent health, incredible wealth, fame, and beauty, the landscape is uneven and contested (Pulido, Barraclough, & Cheng, W., 2012). Historical and ongoing degradation of the environment coupled with social exclusion and processes of dispossession operate alongside pockets of privilege and sheltered luxury endemic in casino capitalism and neoliberal urbanization. Rental prices in the coastal neighborhoods of “Silicon Beach,” the real estate moniker that gestures towards the massive influx of technology companies and startup capital to the Westside, have soared, thereby dislocating families, countercultural activities, and smaller business to less expensive areas in the city. Despite calls from environmental educators for cities to develop long term sustainability plans and practice environmental stewardship (Russ, 2015), mainstream urban EE rarely names capitalism as a formidable obstacle to realizing sustainable community. However, critical environmental scholars (Kahn, 2010; Hursh, Henderson, & Greenwood, 2015; Shindel Dimick, 2015) have long argued how addictions to market-based solutions and techno-fixes restrict how we imagine and practice environmental education.

Within this context and confronting these tensions, this study asks: How do youth make sense of emergent understandings of structural inequalities, contradictions, and social and environmental injustices through visual representations of space? In what ways can participatory approaches to artmaking assist youth and teachers in crafting place consciousness? How do youth’s representative and narrative choices in artmaking reflect their knowledge of and/or experiences in visual-centric networked participatory cultures, like online social networks? Applying critical media pedagogy (Morrell, Duenas, Garcia, & Lopez, 2013; Kellner & Share, 2007), participant observation, and emergent participatory methodologies with current enrolled youth onsite as well as interviewing alumni about their reflective processes, this work seeks to address how youth produce knowledge of place, identity, and sustainability by integrating digital technologies and developing narratives.

Author

• Jennifer Stoops, The City University of New York