No abstract

This paper explores a partnership between a high school, university researchers, and community artists in the service of improved student learning, empowerment, and self-expression through the urban arts. The Urban Arts Project partners teachers at James Lyng high school with hip-hop and other urban artists to develop units across the curriculum, supported by subject-area specialists from McGill’s Faculty of Education. In this article, we introduce the project and what we have learned about processes of school reform through cross-sectoral collaboration from the rst year of our partnership. This includes sharing the perspectives of the teachers and artists most actively involved in the rst year’s initiatives (with video interview links).

This article draws upon Rancière’s concepts of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ and ‘dissensus’ in order to explore some of the tensions and processes at work in a multi‐year school change project that sought to transform a school through the ‘urban arts’. Building on student interest in extracurricular Hip‐Hop and street art programming, the school tried to integrate the urban arts across the curriculum through a partnership with local arts organisations and university researchers. While there were a number of project successes, the project also faced significant resistance, which in Rancière’s terms might be inevitable since the project tried to transform the dominant ways of doing and making in the school, displacing those who no longer saw themselves reflected. We understand the tensions in light of the disruptive power of street art and Hip‐Hop culture, but also as manifestations of antiblackness in education. Using data from a three‐year critical ethnography, we share a series of narrative vignettes which unpack the role of the visual arts in challenging the distribution of the sensible at the school, and offer insight into how teachers might have been better invited in as participants in dissensus.

Melissa Proietti is a PhD student at McGill University as well as a youth worker and street art coordinator at James Lyng High School in Montreal. In this interview, she describes an urban arts pedagogy project at the school. In its rst year, the students, in collaboration with McGill and various community groups, created a gallery space in the school and held their rst exhibit. Ms Proietti talks about the advantages of incorporating urban arts in the school curriculum and the lessons she learned from working with students on the project.

The urban arts play a significant role in the lives of many of today's youth and may thus be a powerful vehicle for students to engage in and with mathematics. The Urban Arts Project (UAP) aims to incorporate the urban arts across all curricular subjects in one secondary school in Eastern Canada. A key feature of the project is to bring in artists to partner with school teachers in designing and delivering lessons that integrate urban arts. In this paper, we describe the case of one urban street artist and one mathematics teacher and the development of their collaboration to teach two interdisciplinary units of study. Although both the artist and teacher articulated initial hesitations to work across disciplinary boundaries and to collaborate, interview data suggest that by the end of the collaboration, both members had developed mutual respect, an important component in a successful collaboration. In the paper, we describe three factors that were important in supporting the development of this mutual respect: a) opportunities for the artist to watch the teacher teach prior to the unit; b) a pivotal moment where the artist's respect for the teacher was made explicit; and c) an artist-teacher liaison who was able to help facilitate collaboration between the artist and teacher. Given the success of this transdisciplinary collaboration, we encourage (mathematics) educators to think more broadly about opportunities and options for collaboration. By extending beyond disciplinary boundaries, collaborators can learn and benefit from varied and diverse perspectives.