waiting on myself

A new year.  A new job.  And more individuals infiltrating my goals and actions.  I wouldn’t have thought that one short phrase would have such an impact on me.  But in a meeting with my principal, he recounted a story of his son, as a young child.  He created an image in my mind of his son, jumping on the couch.  And when his father asked him, “What are you doing?”  His son’s reply was, “Waiting on myself.”  Profound?  Profound.

There are many things that have had a restorative effect on me with the transition to a new school.  The curricular possibilities, the program organization, the supplies and technology available, the students’ lack of disrespect and violence (comparatively) and so on.  But perhaps the aspect that makes me feel most at home here is the dialogue of a few certain people here.  The connection to the why’s of teaching.  The presence of philosophies and beliefs…if only in a few.  It existed where I came from, but the struggles became stifling and the support of belief was lost.

Remembering the genuine thread of education.  Remaining a part of something positive and beautiful.  It’s not easy to stay connected to this.

Waiting on myself.  Waiting on ourselves.  We need to be waiting, so maybe we can meet when we show up.

given the gift of wonder

Not the arm, but the heart…

Today at school, an assistant of Arne Duncan came to a round table made up of teachers at Gage.  The conversation centered on the recent firings at work. I wasn’t there, but the part that stood most out to me was this:

When one of my colleagues mentioned the number of staff laid off this week, in relation to the number of staff at the school, he said how he understood it was like cutting off someone’s arm and asking them to do the same amount of work.  A colleague responded, “No, you don’t understand.  The people we lost weren’t an arm, they were the heart.”  And he went on to explain the extent to which those were laid off are involved in the students’ lives and the soul of the school itself.

I am one of those 13 teachers who were notified this week that after the 2009-2010 school year, my services would no longer be needed.  The powers that be failed me and 12 others who were dedicated to the school and its students in ways we are not asked or even expected to be.  Every student who heard responded to the extent of, “Why you guys? Why not the teachers who don’t care?  Why not the teachers who suck?”  And I could only explain it had to do with departments and years and money…nothing else.  I had no answers for them about what they could do, other than be involved to change the way things are.  I didn’t know what else to tell them, to make them feel better.  Nothing has made me feel better about it yet either.

The public system is broken.  I’ve known that since choosing this profession, but I thought I would get to play the game.  Instead, they’ve pushed away a group of people, small as we may be, that wanted to genuinely be involved in real, meaningful ways.  It feels like I’ve been dumped.  The whole building feels dumped upon.  Everyone, well, almost everyone,  is walking around in a state of shock and/or depression.  Tears have been shed all week.  Offers of solidarity have been made by many.  But still, there we are.  Students and teachers, victims of a messed up system that takes into account only numbers and figures.  Not relationships, not evaluations, not work, not teachers, not students.

I’ve never wanted to be one to complain or preach.  But this is wrong.  Not only because of what happened to me.  If it had just been me, I could handle this in a completely different way.  But they’ve taken away 13 people who meant way too much, had too positive an impact on too many an overlooked life.  And if this is what’s happened at Gage, then what about the other 61 public high schools in Chicago?  How hard hit have we all been by this disregard for public education?  What next?

The steps keep moving in certain directions.  To charter schools, which many of us are now looking at for employment out of necessity.  To other fields, where we will be treated more fairly and justly.  To ourselves, to question how much we should care.  And while Obama and Duncan speak of test scores and transforming schools, they just reinforced causes, whose effects will detract from both those goals.  Without a heart, you’re increasing the one thing that public urban schools need no more helpings of…apathy.  Congratulations.

Goodbye, Electives…

The school year is wrapping up to a sure, but steady close.  It’s evident through attendance, the water balloons, the impending yearbook arrival, and the amount of movies being shown in classrooms throughout the building.  At this time each year, I find myself extremely reflective about my teaching and my students’ learning. 

This year, my fourth in the classroom, ends with added bittersweetness and question.  This is my senior year, and the students graduating have been with me the duration.  I understand now why my high school Spanish teacher refused to attend the year end activities.  It’s strange to know they leave, and they really do leave.  So while the group of students I have been closest to make ready their exit, changes are afoot.  Jobs are going to be lost.  The school will look and feel so differently next year.  And with the changes, curriculum, of course, will be affected.

While nothing is ever certain, and changes happen on a moment’s notice, my electives will be gone.  The concept of electives is quite different at my neighborhood school.  If mine are any indicator, as I believe they are, they have among the highest failure rate.  Student motivation in a non-required class is low.  I’m not sure I can even guess the number of times I hear, especially of late, a student say, “I don’t even need this class.”  It shows.  They don’t see any need of it.

With that, they will disappear.  The students and the system agree.  They aren’t needed.  Never mind the course of the curriculum, the integration of content areas, the higher order thinking, the independence given, the new ideas introduced.  The way in which we deem success in this current system – through assessment, sorry, make that formalized assessment – shows these classes as expendable.  Some might even say worthless.

So, in hopes of redeeming my own teaching spirit and motivation, I turn to reflect on what they have gotten out of my film studies and multimedia art classes.  If only to reassure myself that, although I know I should’ve played the game better, something meaningful happened.  Right now, my class is watching a film in Japanese, with subtitles, and this is something like the sixth film in a foreign language they have seen.  Almost all of the students had not experienced that before, and while the surface of that experience might not change the course of their learned lives, I like to believe it opens them a bit more to tolerance…among other, grander goals.

The big goals of my curricula have always been to give students skills and knowledge to be able to live more wide-awake – Greene’s term that I always return to.  I want to show them there are different planes of existence, and that naming, questioning, and making connections in our worlds can lead to transformations.  I believe this, and it is an essential thread through all the discussion about social justice education.  But it’s so hard to see, especially when the evidence of learning – the projects, the papers, the dialogues – are not there.  So what evidence do I have?  Because it’s hard to believe (and depressing as hell) to think that after 40-something weeks spent with 120 students, none of my goals were reached.

They’re watching the film.  They didn’t complain (this time) about the subtitles.  They tell me ideas about projects, even if they never manifest.  They return after graduation to talk about art.  Other students ask me what I am teaching next year, because they heard my classes are cool. 

And my reply…”Well, Art I, if you still need it for graduation.  I think the electives are gone.  But thanks.”

creating education from within

Little Village Lawndale High School (LVLHS) has a recent but rich history in Chicago that captures the attention of those of us who dedicate our teaching towards matters of social justice.  Its creation and ongoing mission both point towards the possible within public education and community involvement.  From its inception in the hearts and action of its community members to its continued dedication from students, teachers, and neighbors, LVLHS has been an example of culture and community becoming the identity of a school and, even more exceptional, the source for its curriculum.

The school is located in Little Village, a predominantly Latino community on Chicago’s southwest side.  The neighborhood is one of the most highly populated communities in the city, and when funds were opened up by Chicago Public Schools in 1998, Little Village was one of three areas to be slated for a new school.  While the other two neighborhoods received their schools by 2001, both of which serve predominantly white communities and practice selective enrollment for their admission, the high school for Little Village was never created.  School officials, most notably the CEO Paul Vallas, stated that the funds had run out and were no longer available.

After many disappoints trying to work through the system for a new school, the last straw for the community members took place when the facilities manager for CPS, Tim Martin, visited Little Village and offered options that failed to provide for the amount of students the community had hoped.  When the choices were responded to with protests, Martin stated that their hopes for the new school were unfounded and “their sons would still end up in gangs, while their daughters would still get pregnant” (Friedman, 146-148).  This comment and the obviously unfair treatment prompted the community to organize into what would become one of the most visible grassroots movements in Chicago’s contemporary history.

The culmination of actions resulted in the setting up of a protest camp on the site for the school and the declaration of a hunger strike on Mother’s Day 2001 by a group, mostly mothers and grandmothers, from the community.  The site was named Camp Chavez in honor of the famous Chicano labor organizer Cesar Chavez.  During the hunger strike, which lasted 19 days, the protesters remained focused on creating a space on their own terms, something that would last through the creation of the school and into its use.  One prime example is when Paul Vallas finally admitted that there was a voice to be heard (highly suspected as a result of the national media convention of the protests) and visited Camp Chavez.  When Vallas arrived, the protesters refused to leave their tents to speak to him.  Instead, they waited for him to enter their tents and talk to them on their own terms, which included sitting on a milk crate during negotiations.  This important moment seems to have given them the momentum to pursue the direction of the school on their terms as well as reinforce the belief in their power as a force within the community.

When a new appointee, Arne Duncan, took the office of CEO following Vallas that fall, the promise of funding had been renewed and the wheels set into motion to create the new school.  The institutional practices of doing so, however, made it difficult for the community which had been so instrumental in the birth of the school to remain involved.  Yet, through organization and keeping an ever-present voice, they established themselves as integral throughout the process.

The community sought for the school to embody not only the culture of the communities it would serve, but also represent the involvement and struggle that led to the school’s creation by those who lived within the community.  The architects held public forums where community members could bring forth ideas essential to their goals and needs.  Friedman cites the work of Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place, to point out that many believe that shared public spaces “have the power to evoke visual, social memory” (p. 150) and the architecture and the organization of the Little Village Lawndale High School reflect this.  The memory of the 19 days of hunger strike are represented in both the 19 degree angles found in the buildings’ windows, in addition to a spire which contains a sun dial that allows light to reflect a series of mirrors on the actual days of the strike each year.  Such examples are found throughout the building, in addition to inclusion of styles, icons, and symbols of the predominant Latino and African-American cultures served by the school.

In its organization, the school was created in following with the Small Schools Movement.  Little Village Lawndale High School is a campus that houses four different high schools, each with a different mission: Multicultural Arts High School, World Language High School, Social Justice High School and Infinity Math, Science, and Technology High School.  As the leaders within the school and the community members realized, it is within these schools, through organization (mission, planning, etc.) and curriculum that the realities of community and culture have the best potential to continue to keep the spirit and ideas alive that created the schools.

Each of the small schools within the campus of Little Village Lawndale High School include in their mission and vision statements concepts that are deeply connected to the spirit of community and culture, and what we now consider social justice within the world of education.  Goals such as putting “into practice the ideals of freedom, justice, equality, equity, and human dignity” and “to become critical thinkers who are culturally and socially responsible” (LVLHS website, 2009) show evidence of a continued connection related to the school’s history and community’s continued involvement.  With so much attention on the school since its conception, dilemmas have arisen into the conversation about LVLHS, such as debate over its success – as measured by statistics and test scores and changes in leadership.  Yet, still work of many teachers, students, and community members provides evidence that the missions and visions posted on their website are alive and strong.  Those examples range from student presentations and teacher articles, to the opening of a community health center that serves students and neighborhood residents from the school building.

Most of the recent dialogue in academia about the focuses on the School of Social Justice – one of the small schools; also known as SOJO – especially in terms of curriculum and particularly due to the work of two individuals: Eric “Rico” Gutstein and David Stovall, both professors of education at University of Illinois at Chicago and teachers at SOJO.  They have shared their work as teachers within the field of curriculum and educational policy in order to further promote and analyze education that reflects culture in positive and creative ways.

Gutstein (2007) discusses the concept of culturally relevant pedagogy, a term introduced by Gloria Ladson-Billings, and how many educators have recognized it as important to have “knowledge of students and their families, communities, contexts, experiences, cultures, and languages” (p. 190).  His desire as an educator is to assist in creating opportunities for students to participate in an actualization, in the sense of Paolo Freire’s work, towards liberation and humanization – goals central to most who consider themselves social justice educators.  As Gutstein explains his ideas, he discusses how his curriculum moves towards building political relationships in his classroom, as a means for teaching towards social justice in a discipline generally considered devoid of skills other than content – the mathematics classroom.

For Gutstein, building a political relationship with students means that not only does the teacher spend time with the student in and outside of class to build a meaningful connection, it means taking it further into the world of social justice.  For instance, he feels teachers should include the study of injustice, and he provided an example from his own classroom where students had to do a data analysis and probability project on racial profiling.  In another, he shares a project about displacement (results of urban gentrification), which started by involving students in focus groups to assist create the actual project.  Gutstein states that at SOJO, political uses of mathematics have become normalized to the point where students were actively involved in the dialogue about the curriculum.

In an action research project that Stovall pursued with a colleague who is also a lawyer, Delgado, students examined “the processes of the judicial system in order to analyze their own lives” within a colloquial setting at SOJO (Stovall & Delgado, 2009, p. 68).  They facilitated the course, but its direction was student-led.  Students generated issues of concern within their personal lives, and from there the curriculum developed through research components, actual involvement with the judicial system, and an actual engagement through presentation of ideas and lessons learned.  This approach, which required for the students “to engage in a collective process that confronts the real-life conditions of young people in their communities” (Stovall & Delgado, 2009, p. 68) directly exhibits the goal of keeping the curriculum connected to the culture of the students and around the students.

They were not creating a curriculum outside of the students’ lives and identities, but directly from within.  Stovall’s work includes more examples of directly involving the culture of the students within the curriculum.  In a class he created with students, Education, Youth and Justice, students wrote an article that established who they were as a school and what they needed to do in order to improve as social justice high school, centered on and created from the community.

Searching through the examples of Stovall and Gutstein’s work, I was fulfilled in finding evidence within the dialogue of the academic education world of curriculum based on students’ lives and cultures that was more genuine, more critical than that of the typical multicultural education taught in most teacher education programs.  Yet, still I feel disheartened that there is not a more extensive dialogue about these issues within the teaching community, one of the reasons I first pursued continuing my graduate study.  The discussion is going on, but not in the teacher work rooms, not at professional developments, and not at after work cocktail hour.  I believe there is a break between the teachers and the scholars, because we, as a nation/culture/etc., have separated the two.  Still, Gutstein and Stovall are two examples, and I am grateful they are two nearby examples, of the two strangely separate fields converging in such a prolific way.

Little Village Lawndale High School has its struggles set before it in the world of public education and Chicago politics, but it is a living example of a school and a curriculum embodying a people – with their culture, histories, goals, and realities.  When discussing small schools in the introduction to a book about social justice education, Maxine Greene states that in “the very least, there are opportunities for the long-silenced to be heard, for the invisible to become visible…they are open to multiplicity and difference. They can afford provocations to individuals to choose themselves” (Ayers, W., Hunt, J., & Quinn, T., 1998).   I think it is safe to say that in the very least Little Village Lawndale High School has provided these opportunities, and beyond measure, has shown it is worth the try.

defining a community space

As our world changes, there seems to be less and less places where people come together physically.  However, our needs for these places do not diminish, as seen in places like farmers’ markets, public libraries, neighborhood parks, and flea markets.  I find this last locale, a flea market, unique among places where everyday people physically interact.  In particular, I wanted to look at Chicago area flea markets because I wonder about how others who are intimately connected to them regard the markets as physical communal spaces, the term I am giving these kinds of spaces within community.

I seek to address the following question: How do vendors and visitors interpret the flea market as a space of community through thought and action?  At the New Maxwell Street Market and the Ashland Swap-O-Rama, both established Chicago flea markets, I will conduct field observations and capture photographs and sounds as artifacts in addition to beginning interviews.  My goal is to see how individuals, who have ongoing relationships with the market, interpret it as a place of community.  What is meaningful about those spaces?  What needs does it meet in their lives?  The responses and observations from my work will connect to bigger ideas about where community happens and the importance of communal spaces for us all.

The central question of my study is: how do others interpret the flea market as an important part of their community?  Along with this question, I am wondering what kind of meaning making occurs for those who have an extended relationship with these spaces. Just as we look at the curriculum of schools to see how it impacts the life of a student on an economic, political, and too rarely personal level, we can look at other sources and kinds of learning – other curricula.  What is the curriculum of a Chicago flea market?  What does it teach those who visit once, and those who have gone for years or even decades?  What kind of learning occurs there that impacts how participants then live their lives?  With the findings, maybe we can have a clearer understanding of what kinds of spaces are missing from the acquisitive, contemporary world in which we all live in hopes it will inform our approaches towards building stronger communities.

at the flea market

Ashland Swap-O-Rama

Walk in, greeted by red and white striped ticket booth, with an older white lady selling admission, $2 adults, the tickets are dispensed by an old school box office machine.  She pushes it and a red ticket comes out of the slot.  Then a young man asks for my ticket as I walk in.  He’s an ex-student of mine, Rolando.  We chat for a minutes.  I pass the booths where people are eating and the food counter to start at the farthest row.  A familiar aisle and beckoning me is the smell of leather from a booth of cowboy hats and boots.  A girl of like 7 sits in front eating hot chips.  Waiting for me? Her mom?  Her next task?  Rounding the corner are 4 arcade games.  Classics – Cruisin’ USA and a claw machine among them.

Barber shop

Pet supplies

Car speakers

Cleaning supplies

Fake ipods

Birds

Puppies, kittens

Bunnies (Cermak Pets, 2417 W. 51^st St)

Eyeglasses

CD’s

Remnants

Plain t-shirts

Playing video games (rock band, old NES)

Gold jewelry

Imitation bags

People are ?

Haircuts

Watching the birds

Wireless/prepaid – tons of people – cell phone accessories

Blue and silver tarps on closed stands

Photographer

Herbal remedies

Framed pics

Make up

2 silver pots, overflowing w/nacho cheese

Base covered in foil, drippings of cheese

Women dousing cups of fries in cheese

Long lines for cheesy fries

5 “barbers” – one has doors like a room

Bras

Tarot card reader

Surveillance equipment

Key maker – young girl, late teens, early 20s

and so on…and so on….

More than anything, I can’t get over the feeling of being an outsider.  Never have I before, which was part of why I wanted to work with the flea market.  I want other people who do not go to them to understand that there is something extremely unique and special about them.  But is there?  Or is it just a weird, quirky place in Chicago’s economic world.  I am worried that I won’t be able to do the research project because I don’t know how to approach people there, nor do I have the confidence.  We’ll have to figure that out.  Good thing there is Aunt JoAnn.

What did I see on day one?  What did I get out of it?  Other than feeling like a complete outsider.  I was reminded of some important things that will connect to the concept of the flea market as a communal space.  Let’s go through those.

There is a deep connection between the vendors.  A day at the flea market is long.  And very rarely are you swamped with customers.  Also, you sit beside the same person usually every weekend.  Relationships emerge.  Not always positive ones.  But most seem to have their fellow comrades that make the days go smoothly and quickly.  Even I, whose memory is slight, can remember certain other vendors from my days as a child there.  The lady who sold the perfume and Avon stuff just down from us.  She always spoke to me, was very nice, etc.  There was the Middle Eastern man who sold gold jewelry down at the west end of the aisles.  I was entranced by him. He was super nice to me, he wore a turban, and he always smelled of a musk oil or cologne or incense or something.  On this first visit, I was reminded of this by the strolling of vendors down a stand or two to visit with a neighbor.   One was extremely flirtatious, and almost strange.  The woman kind of slapped the man, playfully, but he didn’t seem too comfortable regardless.  Vendors always stay in eyesight of their stand though.  It is when they need to run to the restroom or for food, etc., that they take turns watching each other’s stands.

The flea market was Wal-Mart before there was Wal-Mart.  I always tried to explain this to people when I would take them there for the first time.  That this serves the economic need for those who do not make/have a lot of money.  That a lot of essential things are purchased there.  Such as the socks and t-shirts galore.  More recently, with the increase in both vendors and Chicagoans with Mexican roots, things like produce and boots have become more popular too.  Observing what people are actually buying the most of, things like bedding, coats, socks, tools, cleaning supplies, make up, etc., I am further convinced of the role of flea markets being similar economically to Wal-Mart.

Socially too.  In rural Indiana, where I lived for many years, we would spend an hour or so of a Friday night running around a Wal-Mart.  Not necessarily to purchase anything, but more so because we could go look at clothes and cd’s, play some video games, run rampant through toy aisles (yes, we were teenagers), and mostly, people watch.  It is a center of the community because it provides some essential goods and services for the community.   With that role, there will always  be people to see, visit with, just observe.  The flea market is much the same thing.  It is very typical to see a family in their Sunday best at the market.  Not too many black bags in hands, maybe one of two.  And guessing from what is usually in my two bags, they are probably holding batteries, mop detergent, or a six pair of socks.  At my day one visit, I was overwhelmed by how much people watching going on.  I guess I knew it was present and a major inspiration for the project, but when looking for it, it still surprised me to see the extent I did.  At the booths next to the concession stand, most tables were full of people, not eating, but just resting and watching the parade of visitors strolling along.   At the picnic tables outside, there was a number of people sitting and watching, such as the older men who I guessed were waiting for their wives.  The vendors too, are actively engaged in people watching as it is rare for most of them to have customers occupying their time and attention.

So day one, a beautifully warm Saturday in November.  And Saturday is so different then Sunday.  Sunday is the busy day, as most in the “industry” would agree, which accounts for the number of tarped stalls last Saturday.  So, let’s venture now to another market on Sunday.  And get another picture of the space created as a flea market.

confronting our landscapes

To  be in touch with our landscapes is to be conscious of our evolving experiences, to be aware of the ways in which we encounter our world.

The above statement comes from Greene’s preface to Landscapes of Learning (1978, page 2).  As she sets up her book, the role of the landscape takes center stage to the process of learning and understanding the world.  The landscape is the lived life of an individual, the experiences that create one’s world.  As an artist, the concept of this landscape opens up a new way of conceptualizing what happens to each of us as we learn.  Just like portraiture as a research method changed my own perspective on my role as an educator, a researcher, a student and an artist, the landscape has opened up a way for me to understand Polyani’s personal knowledge in a new light….an aesthetic one.

Looking at the more colloquial concept of landscape, fresh in my mind is that of Indiana cornfields.  Having lived in Indiana for all of my adolescence and into adulthood, I am extremely partial to both the Northern Indiana landscape of cornfields, tree lines, and big, open sky, as well as the very green, hilly, and luscious vista of Southern Indiana.  While to many people, these landscapes are simply a daily part of life.  They are so ingrained as the landscape to their daily life that they don’t often appreciate the effects they have.  But coming from an urban landscape as a child, I was always a little more attuned to it in Indiana.

Road back from the Triangle

I’m generalizing a little here, I know.  But I think it is a safe assumption to make that sometimes we need to be away from home in order to truly appreciate it.  It’s easy to walk the same streets, drive the same roads, and not be aware of everything around you.  Looking back at my time in Indiana and how it feels when I return now,  I am glad I have always been able to enjoy the fields alight with fireflies, the random huge tree in the middle of acres of soybean, and the way the state road seems to disappear over a hill.

So how did I miss the fifty year old “NO BALL PLAYING” sign on the corner of my block here in Chicago?

With the physical landscapes of our lived lives, we come into confrontation in different ways – by leaving for a while, from carrying previous perspectives, from artistic approaches, and so on.  Greene is referring to a landscape that is interior, but she also says that we need to experience a self-confrontation.  This self-confrontation is closely related to her concept of wide-awakeness that has guided my graduate study (among other aspects of my life) since I encountered it.  She defines self-confrontation as a discovering of “new vistas of personal vitality” (page 32) arousing us from a kind of submergence.

This self-confrontation can create a transcendence that can “allow one to go beyond what one has been” (page 36), but it requires finding what Greene calls openings.  I understand these openings as spaces within one’s landscape that will allow the light to change, the perspective to skew, the tone to shift, the story to emerge a little truer, a little deeper.

With a new frame to view the work of Greene, and the work of mine, I continue and hope to seek ways to develop opportunities for students to confront their landscape in meaningful ways, looking for spaces, and a stronger ability to walk their paths wide-awake.

searching for spheres of freedom

I have begun my focused obsession with Maxine Greene with her work The Dialectic of Freedom (1988).  I chose this text because I have struggled with wrapping my mind around the idea of teaching for social justice, mainly because I struggle with what social justice looks like (or would).  While the book does not address social justice curriculum, per se, it does address an important conceptual ingredient to that – freedom.

Greene works her way through the discussion of freedom starting with schools’ role in democracy and its relationship to freedom, to the American pursuit and value of it, into a discussion of women in the arts (and society) and their struggle with creating a free space in their lives.  She continues into a look at the cultures and communities that make up our plural society and ends with ideas about creating spaces of freedom in classrooms and through the arts.

While part of me (the practicing teacher I suppose) is always somewhat seeking implications for my classroom, I find myself again and again adhering to ideas that stand out.  In Dialectic of Freedom, her basic definition of freedom, connected greatly to the ideas of Hannah Arendt, is what emerges for me the most.  Freedom is this space that is created – partly by ourselves and partly by the world in which we live.  Freedom as a space – I never thought of it like that before, and that space is completely connected to the actions that must take place within it.

Not only do we need to be continually empowered to choose ourselves, to create our identities within a plurality; we need continually to make new promises and to act in our freedom to fulfill them, something we can never do meaningfully alone.

This is where I find myself understanding teaching for social justice, the role of the arts, and the role of myself as a teacher.    One of my favorite eras of American history is that of the New Deal.  Maybe I romanticize (well..I know I do!), but it seems to me that they indeed created that space during the projects associated with the Works Progress Administration.  Greene also addresses this era, and she describes it as an exemplar because it created “the kinds of support systems that made freedom attainable for many who were excluded before” (p. 50).  It created a community that transcended those existing at the time.

She ends Chapter 2 focusing the rest of the book’s journey around searching for “freedom developed by human beings who have acted to make a space for themselves in the presence of others…for those willing to take responsibility for themselves and for each other” (p. 56).  It is this focus, this perspective that I can see myself taking as an educational researcher: collecting the stories of others who have done this, in order to further expand the community concerned with freedom and justice.

Greene’s examples throughout the book are inspiring: her discussion of women, most of who I had never heard of, her recount of Harlem Renaissance and civil rights writers and artists, her philosophical connections to those also concerned with the pursuit and construction of this space.  Yet the final chapter, I found myself drawing even more arrows and asterisks and writing more questions in the margins.  Greene is beyond inspiring (which is why I am here), but why I find myself most connected to her is she embodies the philosophical in a way that is truly practical – although the word practical kind of makes my stomach churn.  There is no separation with her ideas and work, and too often, our actions and our ideas do not exist harmoniously.

I am beyond excited at the notion that I might be able to further connect this for people in the field of education and with the arts as a centering role.  Greene includes a portion of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer in her final chapter.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.  This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island.  And what does such a castaway do?  Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn’t miss a trick.

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.  Not to be onto something is to be in despair. (1979, p. 13)

This resonated in me in ways concerned with my own life, the work I strive to do as an educator, and the images and experiences I long to continue as an artist.  It is more than easy to get “sunk in everydayness” – especially as a public school teacher.  Greene, again, continues a discussion about this other space we can live in.

and the public is….

Thus far, I feel I have focused more on the personal within curriculum rather than the public.  I have discussed the public’s crucial role in art – as a viewer and consumer, but not feeling like I totally grasped the concept of public curriculum, I turned to a few articles and writers who addressed this.  I wanted to better understand what a curriculum might look like which engaged and focused on the public sphere.  Much of this was inspired by my work with project treehouse and our taking curriculum to the streets, and also by work I encountered at the National Art Education Association conference.

To better clarify the role of public in these discussions, I first turned to Henry Giroux’s idea of public pedagogy.  In his writings, he focuses heavily on the role of power in public pedagogy and how understandings of power are constructed, contested, and reaffirmed with the public sphere.  One chapter I read in The Giroux Reader focused on the role of Disney in creating childhood innocence as commodity within capitalism.  While I haven’t read a lot of his work yet, what I like most is that he doesn’t just take down everything within the public sphere (although I wouldn’t mind Disney’s downfall), but he does stress the importance of the power we give visual cultures over our lives, our children, our beliefs, and our finances.

Giroux’s concern with the impact of visual culture is a recurring discussion in the art education field.  Many art educators (Kerry Freedman being a leading one, jagodzinski another) address the importance of teaching visual art with aspects of visual culture that are major parts of students’ lives, while also talking about the importance of creating more critical consumers of that visual culture.  Yet I feel like most art educators that share in this conversation do not explore it with their students in the production of art as much as the study of art, or else it is too often used as a hook, a way to engage the students in a lesson where a set of artistic skills are then transferred.  As a teacher, I latched on early to the importance of visual culture in this way– not focusing so much on things like anime, video games or the like, but rather with lessons of critique and aesthetics with the objective of students engaging in discussions as more critical consumers of the images they are surrounded by.  Yet each year I have been attempting to more effectively guide students into artmaking that becomes creative constructions of those discussions I have found easier and easier to facilitate.

I feel I have been more successful at making these issues the main focus of my art curriculum, and I know I am lucky enough to be in a school where I am not (for the moment) dissuaded from teaching the way I do.  Yet I am finding greater fuel with the work of individuals like Brian Schultz and David Darts, who are addressing shared topics of concern in ways I find meaningful and inspiring.  The work of Darts has especially focused my thoughts on where I need to be and how I can impact the art education world – big and small.  In the small amount of his work that I have explored so far, I am seeing a combination of philosophical ideas, educational/social goals, interactions with the public sphere and art’s role in each of those.  I feel that he – like Schultz, Lather, Lawrence Lightfoot, and more I will know – is an example of how a researcher/artist can grow along with those who she is teaching, how the construction of ideas, just like the construction of a collaborative artwork, is a result of something happening in a public sphere.  Seeing Darts give his high school students control over the curriculum as well as taking his education college students to the streets of New York City to intervene in the movement and space of the daily lives of passersby lets me know that what I want to achieve is not insane.  That I am not trying to do too much (by teaching, leading a student activist extracurricular organization, beginning doctoral studies, and attempting at times to create art) or that I need some kind of recognition with my work as a pedagogue or an artist.

The public?  It will continue to be extremely important to me because the border between the personal and public becomes so blurred in art, similar to, as Giroux suggests, the realms that hold knowledge in our contemporary culture and because of that the responsibility he gives the intellectual.  The public will remain crucial because it is within the public, the public of the everyday, that I value, partake, and belong.

Works Cited

Giroux, H. A. (2006). Mouse power: Public pedagogy, cultural studies, and the challenge of Disney.  In The Giroux Reader, (pp. 219 – 230).  Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Darts, D. (2008). Art education for a change: Contemporary issues and the visual arts.  Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, 26, 6-12.

Darts, D. (2008). Guerrilla Ed Campaign. From http://mediamind.org/2008/09/05/guerilla-ed-campaign/