Invisible Cities: The Arts and Renewable Community

Background

For the past eight years I have taught a neighborhood urban high school. School progress report data for 2010-2011 reported our adolescent student population at 836 students. Racially our school's demographics at that time consisted of 86.6% African American, 3.3% Hispanic, 4.1 % Asian, 3.6% Caucasian, and 2.4% mixed race. Just two years later, our student population grew to 1618 students. Racially our school's demographics have changed considerably to 69.53% African American, 22.25% Hispanic, 2.97 % Asian, 3.2% Caucasian, and 1.36% mixed race. As a neighborhood school the student population is inclusive of students with physical, emotional, behavioral and learning disabilities. The school currently has a large number of immigrant students, many of whom are identified as ESL/LEP who are aided through special services.

Americas Quarterly stated "we are all immigrants now". Ours is a hemisphere of immigrants, having attracted people from around the globe even before Europeans set foot in the New World. For five centuries immigrants from Europe, Asia and Africa have imparted their influence on the culture, politics, and economics of both North and South America. According to the Global Commission on International Migration three percent of the world's population-about 200 million people- are on the move and the United States has become their prime destination. The result is a plethora of vibrant, diverse global communities that do not fit within stereotypical notions of ethnic or national dominance. ³

The provocations of Invisible Cities suggest inquiries into the phenomenon that as people migrate to new locations throughout their lives, they recreate cities both visible and invisible by the pathways of their memories and lived traditions of their place of origin. In idealistic terms, the concept of the 'city', like a proper name, provides a way of conceiving of a particular space on the basis of interconnected properties, a network of order within which it operates. The concept city functions as a place of transformations and appropriations constantly enriched by new attributes. ⁴ However, the concept city has given way to globalized cityscapes that hold within their boundaries widely varied ethnoscapes, cities within cities wherein the familiar is harbored against the annihilating forces of gentrification. An important goal of this unit is that cultural perspectives that construct memory and identity for marginalized students in urban populations can be used to propel meaningful creative expression and foster the rebuilding of communities through the arts.

The class activities within this unit embrace creative writing, the creation of visual art and the use of digital technology for visual expression and oral presentation. Each activity may be accomplished independently, yet the intention of this unit is that each will build upon the other with the goal of revealing the 'invisible cities' within the students' worlds of experiences. The activities make use of small collaborative groups as well as independent student production in art and writing. In a class activity titled " 'pedestrian speech act, framing the familiar through digital storytelling' ", students will utilize digital video story telling to spatially act-out a place, capturing the visual and aural experience of walking their everyday "city"-the school hallway between class bells. In " 'kicks, a digital photo essay' ", students will explore visual storytelling from an unusual observational perspective. The process of evoking memories of their personal travel stories will begin with the " 'Collage writing' " activity as students respond to travel-related poetic literature. The collage essay will serve as the stimulus of visualization for imagery that will be used in the creation of an original map-like work of art through which students explore their personal geographies. Finally, in " 'Elegiac episodes' " students will create oral poems as remembrances of beloved places recording them as digital videos that are then linked to their art works through digital QR codes.