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In Class
For Next Time!
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In Class
For Next Time
This article was published in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, which means it’s written by an academic expert on the topic and is addressed to other experts (or at least, to an academic audience). Although it’s pitched at a rather high level of understanding, you should challenge yourself to at least grasp the main points: being able to read and comprehend academic articles gives you firsthand access to cutting-edge research; you’ll no longer be dependent on journalists or Wikipedia to translate and curate ideas for you. Nevertheless, if you find the going really tough, here are a couple of short interviews that you can turn to, plus a brief Op-Ed essay Florida published a few years ago, plus an Op-Ed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, which gives you a sense of the then-conventional wisdom that Florida was questioning:
REFERENCES
Richard Florida, ‘Cities and the Creative Class’, City & Community 2:1 (March 2003)
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In Class
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In Class
For Next Time
No new reading for next time — that should give you a bit more time to work on your midterms — but be prepared to discuss the question I raised at the end of class, namely, just what is the Pruitt-Igoe ‘myth’ that the makers of the film we finished Thursday are trying to debunk? What conclusions do they want us to draw from the story they tell?
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In Class
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In Class
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I’ve been waiting for some feedback from Carlo about how things went last weekend, but haven’t heard anything (how’d things go?); absent further information, I’d say we ought to discuss last week’s readings in detail. Let’s just add one fairly short article:
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In Class
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Watching For Ahkeem adds even more detail to an essay like Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on the black family in the age of mass incarceration — and in fact, the filmmakers have similar concerns: one of the main issues they thematise in the study guide that accompanies the film is the so–called ‘school-to-prison pipeline’. Here is how they explain it:
By all available measures, the United States incarcerates its youth at a much higher rate than any other country in the world, with 130,000 youth being incarcerated each year. […] Alarmingly, for many students the point of entry into the criminal justice system is their classroom. The term school-to-prison pipeline is a metaphor for a complex blend of policies and practices that contribute to a student being funneled out of the public education system and into juvenile or criminal justice systems. In For Ahkeem, we see two examples of this beginning with Daje being removed from her traditional school and placed in the court-supervised alternative school, the Innovative Concept Academy. In Antonio’s case, we watch as he becomes disengaged from his schooling, becomes incarcerated, and navigates the justice system without adequate legal support. There are many factors that contribute to and maintain the school-to-prison pipeline and its impact on students. Here, we will detail three of the most well-documented components: the enforcement of zero-tolerance disciplinary policies in schools; the use of exclusionary discipline that removes or reduces the opportunity for students to learn; and the criminalization of misbehavior in schools.
I think it makes sense to kick off our own discussion of the film by considering their questions regarding this issue:
I have some questions of my own that I’d like to add, but since this is already a good bit to chew on, I’ll wait until we see each other in person to pose them.
I won’t be in class on Tuesday; I’ll still be getting back from Austin, TX, by way of Denver, CO (I’ll be walking around both of them with an eye to the claim that we’re currently living in a ‘mid-sized city moment’!). So we’ll start a really great documentary on Tuesday, and finish it up and discuss on Thursday. Remember that if you volunteer to do a Pecha Kucha on one of the readings below, you won’t have to present until Thursday!
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In Class
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