Building an Urban Arts Partnership Between School, Community-Based Artists, and University

Abstract

This paper explores a partnership between a high school, university researchers, and community artists in the service of improved student learning, empowerment, and self-expression through the urban arts. The Urban Arts Project partners teachers at James Lyng high school with hip-hop and other urban artists to develop units across the curriculum, supported by subject-area specialists from McGill’s Faculty of Education. In this article, we introduce the project and what we have learned about processes of school reform through cross-sectoral collaboration from the rst year of our partnership. This includes sharing the perspectives of the teachers and artists most actively involved in the rst year’s initiatives (with video interview links).

Dissensus, Street Art and School Change

“…While there were many project successes, including the art gallery within which students have curated a series of shows receiving awards and much local media attention, the university research team has also been unpacking the lessons learned from this three‐year partnership about project challenges. These include the limits of a school transformation initiative in which the school’s teachers were not actively involved in envisioning the mechanisms of change: while the urban arts vision came from the then school leadership, we soon discovered that there was a lack of teacher buy‐in for a school‐wide integration of the arts from many of the teachers (Low et al, 2016). Teacher buy‐in (including understanding, commitment and enthusiasm) to educational change initiatives has been demonstrated as vitally important to school transformation efforts and the quality of programming in schools (Desimone 2002, 446).…”