NYU ART+EDUCATION CERTIFICATION

critical pedagogy

What Choice? Unpacking How School Choice Leads to School Segregation

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Who has the power to choose in the most racially segregated school system in the US?

Research and Final Project in Art+Education by: Brianna Racoosin, Erin Reid, and Bernardo Siatong 

For our culminating graduate work for the Art+Education program in Spring 2022, we focused our energies on how we could make a critical intervention into school segregation in New York City, one of the most racially segregated school systems in the United States. In particular, through our research we became invested in exploding the myth that School Choice creates a fair and equitable high school education in New York City. Rather, we understand that the policy of School Choice exacerbates segregation and contributes to deep inequities across the many high schools in NYC. This seemingly colorblind policy is steeped in the values of neoliberal racial capitalism and does not adequately serve the students of NYC.

Motivated by our research, we began developing a connection with the youth-led activist organization IntegrateNYC. Through this organizational partnership, we thought about how we might be able to uplift the perspectives of student activists who have the greatest stake in advocating for a better and more just school system. By leaning about IntegrateNYC’s expertise and direct experiences within the system, and contributing our skill set as artists and educators, we developed a workshop series implementing the artist-activist process of visual mapping that serves to visualize some of the harms of School Choice and segregation on youth.

We turned our research into a toolkit for activists, educators, and youth. This toolkit offers background history and context on the connections between School Choice and segregation in NYC, as well as a workshop series implementing the artist-activist process of counter-mapping. Through these activities, our goal is to help participants visualize some of the impacts of School Choice and segregation.

You can download the toolkit from this website:

https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/unpackingschoolsegregation

Image of toolkit cover and title. The text in the image reads: What Choice? Unpacking how school choice leads to school segregation with an image of a student backpackImage is a handdrawn image of a web if topics as a table of contents

As pre-service artist educators, we are invested in building towards a more liberatory and just future for the students of New York City. We envision a future in which students and families have equitable access to opportunity and a reliably strong public school system. We hope that participants who utilize this toolkit can help us grow an archive of activist counter-maps that together tell a powerful collective story which can be used to advocate for change.

Hand drawn visual map of East Village and Bushwick in New York City with streets and buildings Hand drawn visual map that includes visual symbols about school and identity including a bascketball, drawing of a hand, money sign Hand drawn map using X and Y axes to show relationships between power and oppression, limitations and opportunityScreen shot of a classroom with people holding up images of personal maps

The Pink Slip Project

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BIPOC students are disproportionately suspended in U.S. schools. During the pandemic, in-school suspensions have dipped while out of school suspensions have continued to steadily rise. Once school returns to in-person, students will continue to be unjustly punished in school. Ideally, school should be a place of learning and growth. Suspensions stand in the way of that goal, actively taking students away from their education and failing to provide them with the support they need to thrive.


A public performance in a park. People dressed in pink with a large bulletin board saying 'Suspended'

The Pink Slip Project: Avalon Kenny, Molly Rutledge, Mary Anderson, Zoe Stern

In an attempt to unveil the reality of this unjust system, The Pink Slip Project included a public performance/intervention using pink suspension slips and a QR code linking to online resources. This is  participatory “installation” had multiple methods of engaging the public and encouraging reflection and action to address the inequities surrounding public school suspensions and their implementation. Bright pink slips made people curious about the information we were sharing and interested in participating. Passersby could sit in a typical school desk to fill out their own pink slips sharing a personal experience of school suspension or to learn more. Participants also helped identify alternatives for suspensions by writing ideas on the suspension slips and  in chalk and used our desk installation to share their own stories.  Throughout the day, each of the Pink Slip Project collaborators were talking to people about their stories and engaging in dialogue and advocacy for more just suspension methods including discussing restorative justice methods and other alternatives to suspension.

Image of a bulletin board with many pink slips attached to it. The top of the board says "Suspended"A detail of a 'pink slip' suspension card from the bulletin board

There is also a more anonymous and student led side of this project. Pink Slip Project collaborators worked with New York City high school students to create the materials for the installation and conducted a series of interviews and focus groups to  archive their voices and experiences with suspension. These high school perspectives were integral to designing the public performance piece at Washington Square Park. 

Screenshot of the project taken from Instagram. A woman sits at a school desk in front of a board that says 'Suspended' A Gif file includes 4 images of women dressed in pink sitting at a school desk in front of a bulletin board that says 'Suspended'

Image of posters that are on the ground. They include statistics and pie charts describing suspension rates in New York City

Caryn Davidson: BLM in Schools and What We Believe

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Caryn Davidson  teaches visual art at Millennium High School in Brooklyn,  NY. She is an active member of the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCORE) and  facilitated one of the 2019 Inquiry to Action (ItAG) groups: NYCORE Creates! 

Caryn is a long time organizer and NYC steering committee member of the Black Lives Matter in Schools movement and worked on the Year of Purpose website. 

She also illustrated What We Believe: A Black Lives Matter Principles Activity Book for middle and high school students, which was written by educator Laleña Garcia. The book is published by Lee and Low Books and includes quotes, interview excerpts, poetry and other text and extension activities to support youth exploration of BLM principles. 

Assembly with Shaun Leonardo and peer leaders from The Brooklyn Justice Initiative

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On April 19, 2018 artist and Assembly lead educator Shaun Leonardo, along with members of the program’s peer leadership group led a participatory presentation informed by the Assembly curriculum and co-curated by our collaborators.  Assembly is at once a public storefront gallery and an artist-led diversion program for court-involved youth in partnership with Brooklyn Justice Initiatives. Assembly seeks to dismantle the dominant narratives of the “criminal” through a series of workshops designed by artists Melanie Crean, Sable Smith and Shaun Leonardo, in collaboration with individuals who are court-involved, formerly incarcerated, or otherwise affected by the criminal justice system. Through a curriculum based on visual storytelling, participants translate personal narratives into performance in order to replace a culturally embedded conception of criminality with new language so that the mind and body may think, feel, and move in a way not defined by their previous experience with arrest and incarceration. For more information, see the Assembly website: Recess – Assembly

AssemblyArtEdColloquium2018Flyer

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Alumni Project: Tiffany Jones, Dear America

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The Dear America Artivism Fellowship is an internship for high school students designed by Artivist, City-As-School Art Educator, and NYU Art+Education alumna Tiffany Lenoi Jones and Artist Shaun Leonardo.

Tiffany Jones presenting on Dear American: A City As and New Museum Collaboration.

The fellowship is designed to provide space for a close examination of political art practices by socially engaged artists working today including Joseph Cuillier and the Black School, Miguel Luciano, Kamu Ware, and Sol Aramendi. Each Fellow gains an understanding of the various ways in which the boundaries between art and activism are blurred when artists engage audiences in political education, awareness, and motivation. Each week Fellows tackle and explore the root causes of social injustice issues that impact New York City through research, discussions, writing, and art making.

Fellows develop and propose their own localized projects and leave with actionable steps toward achieving their artivist goals, which include but are not limited to, transforming the impact of social injustice in their communities.

The final proposals are presented during a public conference hosted by the New Museum.

Student speaking about Dear America project Student working during a Dear America session. Students working during a Dear America session. Visiting facilitator speaking to students. Four students posing with their artwork. Students working during a Dear America session.

Mirror/Echo/Tilt Workshop

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Mirror/Echo/Tilt is a performance and pedagogical project created by artists Melanie Crean, Shaun Leonardo, and Sable Elyse Smith to examine the language and gestures used to describe experiences of arrest and incarceration. This collaborative project between artists, educators and individuals affected by the justice system uses magical realism as a framework. Performative vignettes are translated through the body and recorded in vacant former institutions such as empty prisons and courthouses to consider how individuals might assert agency in the reclamation of physical and psychic space. Taking the form of video, performance, text, archive and curriculum, the work envisions new language around the way we engage with mass incarceration and inserts counter narratives into the dominant media landscape, which commonly alienates and criminalizes black and brown bodies. 

In this workshop, artist Shaun Leonardo with members of the Brooklyn Justice Initiative at Recess Art introduced elements of the project to Art+Ed students as a way to imagine new interactions and ways of engaging the body as a site of historical memory, trauma and possibility.

Mirror/Echo/Tilt website

New Museum: Mirror/Echo/Tilt

Workshop hosted by Shaun Leonardo and peer leaders from The Brooklyn Justice Initiative.