Urban Children and Intellectual Emancipation: Video Narratives of Self and Place in the City of Milwaukee

For more than 30 years, environmental and place-based art pedagogies have been a defining practice of art education. Place-based pedagogies focus on issues of social responsibility, the betterment of the shared environment, and the use of natural and human resources in the community as pedagogical ideas that work to deepen our senses of place and belonging (McFee & Degee, 1980, Blandy & Hoffman, 1993; Congdon, 2004). Followers of this perspective believe in sustainable forms of learning that support all kinds of people's creative, affective, and aesthetic practices of place-making and spatial appropriation (Blandy, 2008). Learning and caring about place involves not only thinking deeply about a location or setting, but also encompasses social forms of cooperation and interdependence (Blandy, Congdon & Krug, 1998). Place-based art pedagogies practice forms of embodied knowledge including memory and imagination to resist cultural alienation (Gradle, 2008). In a world defined by increased mobility and instability, place is a key factor defining subjectivity through experiences of emplacement or displacement, and being out-of-place, in-between places, or placeless (Gradle, 2007).Because of experiences of migration and unstable home lives, poor urban youth have a greater need for pedagogies that bring a sense of rootedness in place and time (Goodman, 2003). While new media allows a faster circulation of knowledge among communities and subcultures, often this knowledge circulates without a contextual understanding of the culture in which it has emerged. In many cases, this results in conflicting perspectives and challenges to understanding other people's points of view without traditional face-to-face encounters (Jenkins, Purushtoma, Weigel, Clinton & Robison, 2009).Access to new media can define spatial relations and probe deeply into ways the city as a place of power works for different populations. As McPherson (2008) has affirmed, it is key to remember that new media were introduced into a world in which the gap between middle-class and poor families widened, in terms of income and access to social and cultural capital; thus, media uses and technologies are socially stratified. While urban children are targeted more and more as consumers of junk food and promotional stuff, privileged children are targeted for smart technologies, cable TV, and exclusive items. Taking new technologies for granted reinforces a white middle-class experience and exacerbates the social, emotional, and intellectual gaps defining the everyday experience of urban children.Understanding the city as a place of power can expose many trends and practices that hurt young people (Grossberg, 2001). The current Wisconsin state budget, signed by Governor Scott Walker and voted in through a questionable proceeding without the presence of 14 democratic senators, implements a reduction of state funding of $182 million from the Milwaukee Public Schools district for years 2011-12 and 2012-13 (Thornton, 2011). These cuts are alarming results of a long-term trend of cuts in funding for public social structures supporting the city.A key element of urban-centered, placebased pedagogies is the amplification of young people's access to a diversity of traditional and new technologies so they can compare, analyze, create, discuss, and distribute representations of urban conditions of life that meet the unexpected. Further, these pedagogies can expose mechanisms of privilege and structures of inequality that can cause those with access to privilege to question their preconceived ideas about urban existence by breaking social and racial stereotypes.Foundations and Context of the StudyAs McPherson (2008) has affirmed, we need to rely on a complex interdisciplinary effort to build hybrid theories that help us to understand the cognitive, affective, and cultural formations defining young identities today. The project discussed in this article studies urban imaginarles (Huyssen, 2008), through the elaboration of video self-portraits, of a group of 1 5 Latino thirdgrade students who live in Milwaukee. …