Imagining Postnationalism: Arts, Citizenship Education, and Arab American Youth

Abstract

This article explores an Arab American community arts organization as a site for promoting youth civic participation and social activism. Studying a citizenship education project outside the school walls, and focusing on the arts as a medium for this work, foregrounds the role of the symbolic for engaging youth as active participants in democratic society. The article also examines the symbolic political argument for postnational citizenship that the young participants articulated through a film they produced. [Arab American youth, citizenship education, arts, immigration]

Imagining Otherwise: Connecting the Arts and Social Justice to Envision and Act for Change: Special Issue Introduction

“…The push toward standardization, testing, accountability, and assessment in public schools across the nation has limited the opportunities for students to critically reflect upon and become creatively involved in rethinking the many issues they and their communities face daily (Giroux, 2004;Lipman, 2003;Sleeter, 2008;Valenzuela, 1999). As K-12 schools narrow the curriculum, a growing number of social justice arts organization and community centers (e.g., Center for Urban Pedagogy, n.d.; Dreamyard [The Art of Inspiring Education, 2011], and Eyebeam [Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, n.d.]) fill in the gap, often focusing on civic engagement through the visual and performing arts (El-Haj, 2009;Ginwright, Noguera, & Cammarota, 2006). Given the current colonization of school curriculum by test based accountability practices, these projects offer models that classroom teachers may have to smuggle into the few spaces not consumed with mind-numbing test prep routines.…”

International learning communities for global and local citizenship

“…In expanding the term to its international dimension, I am inspired on the one hand by the tradition of undergraduate international education in the United States, especially the work of the anthropologist Ellen Skilton-Sylvester and her colleagues at Arcadia University who have been working successfully to open undergraduate educational requirements to include experiences in local, international and cross-cultural contexts (Skilton-Sylvester, 2010;Shultz, Skilton-Sylvester & Shultz, 2007). In addition, I draw on the critical and action-oriented work of those educational anthropologists who insist on the need to change our notions of citizenship education to reflect intercultural and international diversity and thus work towards more just and open notions of citizenship and belonging in the global context (Abu El-Haj, 2007, 2009Levinson, 2005). Based on these interdisciplinary inspirations, I define international learning communities as a pedagogy of building learning spaces that foster a shared learning experience by culturally and internationally diverse groups of learners in the course of an interdisciplinary educational process that seeks to cultivate social solidarity, critical consciousness, sense of agency and participation toward engaged local and global citizenship.…”

“…We are particularly inspired by the work of those engaged educational anthropologists who have combined in their approach the anthropological method with PAR to motivate practical community-based emancipatory action (Abu El-Haj, 2007, 2009Cammarota, 2008;Cammarota & Fine, 2008;Guajardo, Guajardo & Casaperalta, 2008;Lipman, 2005;Trueba, 1993). In their work and in ours, the goal of the anthropological method and research is not the accumulation of ethnographic data by an academic anthropologist/ethnographer in order to produce an interpretation of the observed cultural reality.…”

La formación ciudadana en la escuela desde la mirada de los futuros profesores de primaria

“…La idea de ciudadanía que la circunscribe a unas fronteras estatales o nacionales ha comenzado a superarse a través de conceptos como ciudadanía global, ciudadanía transnacional o ciudadanía post-nacional, en los que se puede reconocer un cambio importante de perspectiva, pues la concepción de la ciudadanía tiende a desnacionalizarse (Abu El-Haj, 2009;Bosniak, 2000). El enfoque desnacionalizador presenta la ciudadanía como una categoría flexible, dinámica y contextualizada en un espacio en el que se producen alianzas entre los Estados y en el que tienen cabida diversas identidades.…”