The Course
We have to restore the neighbor to the hood.
—Grace Lee Boggs
“Grace Lee Boggs: A Century In the World,” interview by Krista Tippet and Richard Feldman, On Being, National Public Radio, August 27, 2015, https://onbeing.org/…
In my first year at City College of New York in 2011, I was tasked with rewriting the curriculum for the graduate and undergraduate programs in art education. State requirements for certification provided clear guidelines for courses on human development, lesson planning, and literacy courses. However, as I thought about my own experiences in teaching and my research into youth perspectives on what makes effective educators, I realized something was missing. How could I help them see that exceptional teaching requires us to value the relationships we have with our students and their communities in ways that we are rarely prepared for? How could I help them develop the tools to really get to know their students as full, ever-changing, complex beings? How could I prepare them to think critically about the social, cultural, economic, and political forces that share each of us and our interactions with each other? To address these questions, I designed a course that would (hopefully) guide students through a series of activities and experiences to help them critique their own biases, while learning to connect with people who are somehow different. I designed a semester-long “community engagement project” that I hoped would help arts educators analyze their own experiences as they practiced building a relationship with a community outside their typical social spheres. To encourage them to foster intentional relationships with a chosen community, students in the course would complete a series of art activities ranging from looking closely at works of art, creating community maps, attending public events, visiting cultural organizations, researching local artists and community histories, reading fiction, and interviewing community members. Each activity would be interwoven with an artistic or written reflection through which students could analyze their experiences in light of theories on identity development, systemic oppression, and emancipatory education. My reflections (ever-evolving) and those of alumni of this class form the basis of this book–a story at once about uncovering our own biases as it is about connecting with people across difference.
