Reconstructing a Community, Reclaiming a Playground: A Participatory Action Research Study

At a community council meeting I attended in the West End neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio, in January of 2005, the topic turned again to the community's problems and methods for change. The residents and members of the community council sat on metal folding chairs facing four of the community council's leaders in an arts center located in a small strip mall in the neighborhood. Story upon story was shared of violent acts witnessed throughout the community, as residents often turned to the police captain who was present for legal advice on their situations. The first homicide of 2005 had recently occurred in an apartment complex on Linn Street. A woman had been badly assaulted at a convenience store. The stories continued. An elderly woman who owned a small candy and soda store shared a story about her van being "shot up." The windows were broken out with bullet holes. The librarian said she heard four gunshots one afternoon as she walked a group of preschoolers from the library back to the Head Start building. The stories continued.As a resident in this neighborhood, I considered my own potential role as an art educator in contributing to and becoming a part of this community through art. However, despite living in this community, I was perceived as an outsider. As an educated white female, I fell into the minority numbers from this primarily low-income African-American neighborhood. At the same time, I represented those who were causing the neighborhood to change to a more mixed-income, racially and economically diverse community, a change the current community did not necessarily endorse. I had moved into the West End in August of 2003, with my partner, an African-American man who had lived in this neighborhood at several points in his life. His brother's family lived in a public housing complex in the neighborhood for the past 10 years and were just down the street from our new townhome. Despite these connections, I still carried an outsider status to those who did not know me, and I had to realize the perceptions and the realities of oppression and racism among the residents over the years (Apple, 1995; Sleeter & Grant, 1999). I had to learn to listen and continue to build relationships in the community prior to becoming a contributing member of the community and to being able to conduct a research study with them (Hutzel, 2006). My skin color and demeanor contributed to my outsider status, which was reinforced to me at several community council meetings and often when I walked my dog in the neighborhood. I did not necessarily or initially fit into this community and spent the next 10 months building relationships prior to conducting the study (Hutzel, 2006).In this article, I present a participatory action research (PAR) study examining the participants' perceptions of community in general and specifically of their West End neighborhood through a pragmatic approach connecting theory to reality, what West (1989, p. 151) has called "a theology of the streets." The action research method supported a pragmatic approach toward making this connection, while the narrative results of this study provide a critical connection to the theories presented here. As a participant in this study, my own perceptions and learning were central to the study's goals, as I implemented the study to create social change and inform theories of community art education (McNiff, Lomax & Whitehead, 2003).I implemented an asset-based community art curriculum to examine participants' sense of community and as an attempt to encourage social reconstruction through action. The curriculum incorporates social action methods of art education (Anderson & Milbrandt, 2005; Bastos, 1998), service-learning (Taylor, 2002,2004), community art (Adejumo, 2000; Emme, 1998), and community development (Green & Haines, 2002; Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993) in recognizing the important role of local residents in the sustainable regeneration of their community. …