A rare and powerful illustration of what it takes to become a sustainable, community-embedded organization that continually grows the next generation of compassionate leaders.
This essential, timely ...book meets us at our current moment of crisis to offer hope that American democracy’s stalled trajectory toward its founding creed to embrace all, and not just some, can indeed be re-invigorated. Pedagogy of a Beloved Commons is about low-income youth of color working within justice-oriented, community-based organizations to improve the social and spatial conditions in their surroundings. It draws from hundreds of pages of data, some collected over a decade ago by graduate research assistants at three universities and some collected recently by a graduate research assistant at a fourth university, to present verbatim quotes from interviews with constituents of three youth-serving organizations. The book posits that the disinvested neighborhoods where youth experience abandonment and marginality in fact can serve as a call to action, given appropriate organizational support.
Pedagogy of a Beloved Commons envisions a place-based critical pedagogy that can provide young people with the practical skills and deep values to engage with today’s economic, racial, and ecological crises. It offers a welcome antidote to a neoliberal education system that has not only veered away from its public mandate to advance democratic citizenship but that has also reinforced today’s insidious economic inequality, rendering illusive the idea that rich and poor can work together toward a common good. Between these pages resonates a passionate call for an approach to cultivating citizens who have the critical skills to challenge injustice, the courage to hold the rich and powerful accountable, and the empathy to advance not just their own self-interest but also the health and well-being of their communities and the planet. The author proposes that such citizens develop by exercising collective agency in “the commons,” a political and psychic space whose values are mapped out in physical space. Through the expert use of an architect’s lens, this groundbreaking book argues that the three-dimensional concreteness of the nation’s disinvested neighborhoods provides a virtual stage where disenfranchised youth can experiment with collective life, become more discerning about the forces that have shaped their communities, and practice working toward just and inclusive futures.
Merging Paolo Freire’s seminal theory of critical pedagogy with Grace Lee Boggs’s belief that hands-on community-building can disrupt the ever more destructive forces of neoliberal capitalism, Pedagogy of a Beloved Commons refines an aspirational framework for a pathway forward through a careful analysis of three exemplar organizations. It offers rich, unique portraits of young people transforming their communities in southwest Detroit, Wai’anae, and Harlem, respectively illustrating place-based activism through theater, organic farming, and critical inquiry. Here activism is framed as the hands-on engagement of youth in addressing inequities in the commons of their neighborhoods through small but persistent interventions that also help them learn the language of solidarity and collectivity that a sustainable democracy needs. Pedagogy of a Beloved Commons is a must-read for our times and for our future.
When Ivory Towers Were Black lies at the potent intersection of race, urban development, and higher education. It tells the story of how an unparalleled cohort of ethnic minority students earned ...degrees from a world-class university. The story takes place in New York City at Columbia University's School of Architecture and spans a decade of institutional evolution that mirrored the emergence and denouement of the Black Power Movement. Chronicling a surprisingly little-known era in U.S. educational, architectural, and urban history, the book traces an evolutionary arc that begins with an unsettling effort to end Columbia's exercise of authoritarian power on campus and in the community, and ends with an equally unsettling return to the status quo.
When Ivory Towers Were Black follows two university units that steered the School of Architecture toward an emancipatory approach to education early along its evolutionary arc: the school's Division of Planning and the university-wide Ford Foundation-funded Urban Center. It illustrates both units' struggle to open the ivory tower to ethnic minority students and to involve them, and their revolutionary white peers, in improving Harlem's slum conditions. The evolutionary arc ends as backlash against reforms wrought by civil rights legislation grew and whites bought into President Richard M. Nixon's law-and-order agenda. The story is narrated through the oral histories of twenty-four Columbia alumni who received the gift of an Ivy League education during this era of transformation but who exited the School of Architecture to find the doors of their careers all but closed due to Nixon-era urban disinvestment policies.
When Ivory Towers Were Black assesses the triumphs and subsequent unraveling of this bold experiment to achieve racial justice in the school and in the nearby Harlem/East Harlem community. It demonstrates how the experiment's triumphs lived on not only in the lives of the ethnic minority graduates but also as best practices in university/community relationships and in the fields of architecture and urban planning. The book can inform contemporary struggles for racial and economic equality as an array of crushing injustices generate movements similar to those of the 1960s and '70s. Its first-person portrayal of how a transformative process was reversed can help extend the period of experimentation, and it can also help reopen the door of opportunity to ethnic minority students, who are still in strikingly short supply in elite professions like architecture and planning.
Tells the story of how a cohort of ethnic minority students earned degrees from Columbia University's School of Architecture. Follows two university units that steered the school toward an ...emancipatory approach to education. Assesses the triumphs and subsequent unraveling of an experiment to achieve racial justice in the school and in the nearby Harlem community. Informs contemporary struggles for racial and economic equality.
This article draws upon a study of 88 justice-oriented, community-based United States youth programs to explore how youth development philosophies shape the processes and outcomes of participation. ...The programs in the study population score high on a six-item scale measuring youth development philosophies, from more conventional to more transformative in nature. Empirical findings from a survey of program directors reveal three processes of youth participation that fall along a continuum from personal to social change:social integration, at one end,civic activism, at the other, andcommunity improvementpositioned anywhere along the continuum. The specific participatory processes used by programs tend to both reflect their youth development philosophies and shape the outcomes they produce. Findings also reveal a disconnection between the more conventional youth development philosophies that dominate the field and participatory processes that engage youth as agents of change in tackling the inequitable conditions in their lives and communities.
Pre–1965 Context Sutton, Sharon Egretta
When Ivory Towers Were Black,
03/2017
Book Chapter
This story is complicated—fascinating but complicated. You see, its subject matter lies at the potent intersection of race, urban development, and higher education; its backdrop is New York City and ...its historically African American neighborhood of Harlem, where such issues come into exaggerated relief; its time period is the 1960s when the potency of race, urban development, and higher education turned to passion and protest. Ultimately the story will take you to Columbia University’s School of Architecture where a bold experiment in affirmative action took place that few people have ever heard about. To get inside the school—to
Alumni Years Sutton, Sharon Egretta
When Ivory Towers Were Black,
03/2017
Book Chapter
Mark Hamilton graduated in 1978 as the last member of the oral history cohort to straggle out of Avery before its massive oak doors became all but padlocked for U.S.-born persons of color. He was ...among the twenty-six (out of a total of forty-nine) ethnic minority recruits who graduated after the fiscal crisis hit full force in 1973. Actually, the crisis began gathering steam in 1969 and overshadowed all of their early careers. The ethnic minority alumni left Columbia believing that their technical skills, intellectual prowess, and Ivy League pedigrees would surely heighten their marketability in America’s newly desegregated workforce.
1969–1971 Transgression Sutton, Sharon Egretta
When Ivory Towers Were Black,
03/2017
Book Chapter
You are about to ascend the steepest part of the School of Architecture’s arc of insurgency. The revolutionaries who were dragged out of Avery Hall in the wee hours of that bloody Tuesday morning got ...you part way up the arc when their screams exorcised the ghosts of the school’s poor leadership and Beaux-Arts curriculum. The students, staff, and faculty who adopted the Strike Coordinating Committee boycott of classes propelled you a little further along, taking you to a steeper part of the climb when they set in place an experimental operation at the school. They used the brilliance of
1968 Insurgency Sutton, Sharon Egretta
When Ivory Towers Were Black,
03/2017
Book Chapter
Perhaps you are old enough to remember the explosions of 1968; perhaps not. Either way, you will need to summon up their shattering force to receive the experiment in all its passionate potency. You ...see, the dramas of that single year pierced the national psyche in a way that “only the Depression, Pearl Harbor, and the Holocaust have.”¹ Violence was omnipresent, with young people assuming lead roles in various mind-warping dramas. The country’s record-breaking six million draft-age undergraduate students filled roles in some of the dramas, the masses of disaffected black ghetto youth starred in others, the horrifying casualties of
Now that you understand the intensity of this era’s struggle for social transformation, you are ready to enter Avery Hall. You will approach an elegantly proportioned 1912 Italian Renaissance ...building from the west, proceeding dead center to a two-story-high portico supported by the familiar Ionic columns. If it is windy, you will need two hands to pull open the massive twelve-foot-high oak doors, which are framed by another set of never-closed decorative iron gates. Before walking through these doors, take a moment to absorb the transformative context that surrounds you. Violence interspersed with a freewheeling counterculture have not only jolted
