Educating beyond the Borders of Schooling

Abstract

In our recent interviews with 154 poor and working‐class young adults, male and female, across racial and ethnic groups, we hear whispers of hope amid the narratives of despair. In both jersey City and Buffalo, we have wandered through communities that have been ravaged by deindustrialization and a withering of the public sphere. Here we turn our attention to what Boyte and Evans call ‘free spaces’—those spaces in which hope is nourished in spite of impoverished material circumstances. Offering a wider theoretical frame for understanding the social psychology of these spaces than has been offered in previous work, we provide two examples from ethnographic investigations (of an arts community and a spiritual community) as emblems of pluralistic sites. Our goal here is to deepen the theoretical lenses through which we assess such spaces as community‐based educational sites, offering ethnographic data drawn from two sites situated in urban areas.

Art as Critical Public Pedagogy

“…Critical public pedagogy hinges on reality's deconstruction/reconstruction in making power relations visible (Fine, Weis, Centrie, & Roberts, 2000;Grodach, 2011;Jaramillo, 2010). For sure, Camnitzer's work as critical public pedagogy specifically does intend to do that.…”

“What are you Representing?” Contesting Identities of Incarcerated Youth

“…Instead, Uhuru encouraged incarcerated youth and concerned adults to speak up, ''speak from the heart,'' and ''keep it respectful, but keep it real.'' Discussions were unscripted (though typically they unfolded along predictable lines), ''naturally occurring,'' sustained interchanges between adults and incarcerated young adults around topics that typically held high mutual interest-a fact that lends further significance to what was said and not said there (Fine et al 2000).…”

Studying the spatialities of schooling

“…There are probably topics that can be usefully addressed without taking such things into account, but a large literature, virtually none of it acknowledged by the authors, suggests that the issues they are interested in -difference and its normalization, citizenship, embodiment, gender and spatiality -flow across the borders of organizations like schools; that what goes on inside can't be rigidly separated from what goes on outside (for example, Childress, 2000;Connell et al, 1982;Eckert, 1989;Fine et al, 2000;Foley, 1990;Fordham, 1996;Freedman, 1990;French, 1993;Gaines, 1991;Lofty, 1992;MacLeod, 1987;Ogbu, 1974;Rose, 1989;Shultz, 1996;Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988; and many others). If some activities do seem bounded and contained within a school site it means that someone has succeeded in constructing 'the local' in a certain way and buffering parts of it from whatever is outside their engineered boundaries.…”