Portraits of Remembering: Future Implications for School Closure: AERA Sessions, 12:48

• In Event: e-Lightening Ed-Talk Session 8

Abstract

"What happens when we remember a school that was closed? What future implications are possible through collective remembering? With research pointing to the harm done through school closings, researchers and policymakers have an ethical obligation to do better than we have in the past and remembering can be one way to do so. This poster discusses research conversations with teachers, administrators, students, and community members from two Chicago schools that were closed and reopened as non-neighborhood schools in 2009 and 2011, as part of a larger art-based inquiry into the schools. The narrative portraits of remembering created from our conversations provide insight into how the remembering serves as a form of resistance to school closures and a pathway to reimagine more just futures. The stories presented refuse a deficit-perspective, presenting a counternarrative to the dominant ways in which schools are framed when crises are cultivated around budgets, space, and performance in urban districts. This complication of the stories we tell about schools, in turn, invites others to view schools and their surrounding complex systems in different ways than we have in the past. This poster explores the possibilities that are generated from remembering schools, grappling with questions like: Can remembering schools, specifically through collective remembering, help people to pause and reflect on the stories we tell about schools? In turn, could this challenge the assumptions we make about neighborhoods and schools when implementing educational policies that drive school closures?
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Author

• Kristy Ulrich Papczun, University of Illinois at Chicago