Destination Raval Sud: A Visual Ethnography on Pedagogy, Aesthetics, and the Spatial Experience of Growing Up Urban

This article discusses the role of art education in enhancing aesthetic and social interconnections between urban children and contemporary urban environments. As Greene (1995) affirms, it requires imaginative actions to teach children who see differently from their teachers because such children have been reared in poverty or have come from distant places. Both the critical re-viewing of the knowledge that we conceive to be foundational to our discipline and the Involvement in interdisciplinary endeavors are prerequisites for these imaginative actions. Following this direction, the article interweaves a network of ideas inspired by reconstructionist studies of childhood, nomadic and relational aesthetics, and performance art pedagogy. The aim of this interdlsciplinarity is to serve a pedagogy centered on producing knowledge in action, avoiding mystification, and opening new beginnings in relation to which young people feel valued as participants in dialogues and other Instances of public knowledge.The article follows and extends Duncum's (2002) statement that art education should include more consistent and realistic views of children. Art education should engage in more significant ways in current sociological and humanistic debates on childhood identity. Art education needs further experimentation with pedagogies that overcome modernist ideas, like seeing children as abstract and universal projects of development toward adulthood, to understand them instead as individual agents who create and modify cultural meaning.The article is also inspired by Ideas of environmental education and the role of the arts in teaching responsive and transformative pedagogies that enhance the relationships between subjects and their local environments (e.g., McFee & Degge, 1 980; Blandy & Hoffman, 1 993; Congdon, 2004). Followers of this perspective maintain that art education has a social responsibility in bettering the quality of shared environment and in educating children with different cultural backgrounds to creatively cope with the complexities of today's changing and fast-evolving societies (McFee & Degge, 1980). In this respect, placebased art pedagogies support all kinds of people's creative, affective, and aesthetic practices of placemaking and spatial appropriation (Blandy, 2008), even when those practices challenge acquired ideas about what counts as art in modern and contemporary history (Blandy & Congdon, 1998). They concentrate on local forms of knowledge, art, and aesthetics rather than on models of globalized and standardized curriculum decided elsewhere (Graham, 2007).The Spatiality of Growing UpReconstructionist studies of childhood emerged as a response to the multiple dissonances existing between the material experiences of being a child in the actual world and the institutional forms and discourses framing childhood. Theorists working in reconstructive practices of history, sociology, psychology, and pedagogy agree there exists not only one form of childhood, but different childhoods and children, existing as specifically located soclo-constructions and subject positions (Aries, 1 962; Jencks, 1 996; Cannella, 1 997; Duncum, 2002; Cannella, Kincheloe & Anijar, 2002). "Biological facts of infancy are but the raw material upon which cultures work to fashion a particular version of being a child" (Jencks, 1996, p. 20). For this reason, reconstructionist studies contest language and images that naturalize, generalize, and globalize a dominant Western understanding of childhood as an innocent adult-protected experience. This is a discourse that emerged in the 18th century and progressed through the later development of disciplines like pediatrics, psychology, and pedagogy, which centered on the creation of a distinct type of specialized knowledge about children. In this history, what stands for adult protection sometimes can be better re-named as regulation or control. While children are given rights and duties, they are also emptied of all responsibility, political agency, or autonomy. …