Creating Spaces for Critical Praxis, Agency, and Empowerment in Formal and Informal Learning Environments

Session Type: Structured Poster Session

Abstract

Education has the potential to be an emancipatory tool that empowers and transforms individuals through raising critical awareness, fostering dialogue and interactions between people and their natural and built environments, and imagining alternatives to the dehumanizing structures of global capitalism. In this structured poster session, urban educational researchers dialogue with one another as they explore the intersections of their work, which concerns critical pedagogy, urban education, and sustainability demands as well as how place-consciousness and the embodiment of experiences in place are civic acts that interrupt existing hegemonic forms of education. Including gardening, theater of the oppressed, and participatory data analysis, the six posters in this session demonstrate the transformative potential of radical, liberatory praxis.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Paulo Freire, Critical Pedagogy, and Emancipation

Chair

• Jennifer Dawn Adams, Brooklyn College - CUNY

Papers

• Data Carnival: Participatory Analysis of Youth Environments - Marissa E Bellino, The Graduate Center, City University of New York; Olivia Kazior

• Moving Through Place: Youth Knowledge, Identity, and Food Justice - LaToya Strong, The City University of New York

• Roots, Research, Resistance: Constructing Knowledge and Agency in an Urban Gardening Program - Pieranna Pieroni, City University of New York

• Dioramas and Classrooms: Looking and Thinking Critically - Cristina Trowbridge, American Museum of Natural History

• Racism Performed and Discussed: A Study of the Body, Critical Dialogues, and Choques - Natalia Ortiz, City University of New York

• The Maker Movement in Informal Urban Education: An Eco-Pedagogical Critique - Jennifer Stoops, The City University of New York

Discussant

• Richard V. Kahn, Antioch University Los Angeles