By — In the summer of 2004, born out of lack of support and networking available for teaching artists in the city, eight Chicago artists created the Chicago Teaching Artist Collective (CTAC). The group wanted an organizing body to address the specific concerns in the field of artist as teacher. These concerns consist of lacking art [...]
By — How We Learn? Healthy social movements need spaces for learning and experimentation, healthy democracies need wise citizens to make wise decisions about resources and politics, and healthy people need outlets for dialogue in order to learn about new ideas and form cooperative tendencies to help one another. (from the Call For Proposals for Issue#5) In [...]
By — How did an activist, labor organiser, teacher, and artist, especially one with a name like Ellen Gates Starr (1859-1940), manage to escape everlasting renown in Chicago history? She made headlines in her own day; she ran for political office, was arrested on the picket line, was a bookbinder, and co-founded some of Chicago’s most important [...]
By — While it starts in a place relatively remote from Chicago, this text focuses on Mess Hall, an experimental cultural center in the city’s Rogers Park neighborhood. In June 2006, I was on a long walk in southern Minnesota. While spending a luxurious night at a Best Western in Cannon Falls, I caught a brief report [...]
By — Alison, one of the founding members of the Pomegranate Health Collective, lists possible workshop topics for a health conference scheduled for the fall: pain management, nutrition, tattoo care, safer sex, herbalism, gardening, abortion rights, and prisoners’ health. But the list doesn’t stop there; Alison continues naming topics, so many topics that she has to stop [...]
By — Ferd Eggan, a writer, activist, teacher, and tireless advocate for people with HIV/AIDS, died in Los Angeles on July 7 at age 60 after a six-month bout with liver cancer, complicated by HIV and hepatitis C infections. For the past twenty years, Eggan’s leadership and his multifaceted strategic and organizing skills have had an enormous [...]
By — I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what it is that confronts them, and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create their own program; and when the people create a program, you get action. —Malcom X (El Hajj Malik El Shabazz), 1964 As you [...]
By — The Pomegranate Health Collective are a group of d.i.y. (do it yourself) health activists in Chicago, IL dedicated to making health information accessible to everyone. The group is devoted to issues of health from a feminist, non-hierarchical perspective, and addresses issues of physical, mental, reproductive, and sexual health in a women-friendly, queer-friendly and trans-friendly framework. [...]
By — A professor in his early thirties paces at the front of the packed room, lecturing while projecting a Powerpoint. He tells the conference audience that he has identified three teacher-types: the gangsta (hard-case awful, unredeemable) and the wanksta (just riding the fence, but could maybe be pushed over into the good side). The third, the [...]
By — AREA Chicago interviews Mia Henry, the Director of Youth Led Social Change at the Chicago Freedom School (CFS), an exciting new city-wide initiative to provide political and cultural education for Chicago teenagers. The CFS is based on a legacy of “Freedom Schools” developed in 1964 to address racial segregation and economic inequality in the US [...]
By — AREA Chicago interviewed Aaron Hughes, President of the Chicago chapter of Iraq Veterans Against The War about their approach to education, both internally and with the public. Interviewed by Daniel Tucker. IVAW is an organization that is constantly growing and changing due to new members joining as they return home from service in Iraq, developments [...]
By — Daniel Tucker interviews Chicago Public School (CPS) teachers Jesse Senechal (js) and Maura Nugent (mn) about their teaching and research at Kelvyn Park High School (KP) on the Northwest side. Your research was inspired by Arne Duncan‘s (CPS’s CEO) assertion that schools should be like a market, where the student is a consumer and makes [...]
By — Nance Klehm has many different projects going on at any given time, so I won’t even attempt to list them all here. Instead, I’ll simply describe her as an urban forager and gardener. Klehm shares her knowledge of plants and natural processes by offering workshops usually held in her kitchen, and lecturing in more conventional [...]
By — In Eastern Europe, one of the earliest efforts to reclaim a sense of national identity in the post-Soviet era was to remove street names that honored <b>Lenin, Stalin</b> and other Communists. Elsewhere, post-colonial societies typically changed street names upon independence, erasing the presence of imperial powers from maps and road signs. The names that a [...]
By — Our Beliefs and Our Mission The Popular Education Alliance (the PEA) is a group of community educators, organizers, university educators and researchers, students, and activists who believe that popular education and the action it inspires are effective means of promoting self-determination and empowerment among marginalized people—and in this way, serves as a catalyst for systemic [...]
By — Institute for Community Understanding Between Art and The Everyday (InCUBATE) is a research institute and residency program dedicated to challenging current infrastructures, specifically those which affect artistic production. As art historians and arts administrators, our goal is to explore the possibility of developing financial models that could be relevant to contemporary art institutions, as well [...]
By — I began The Green Lantern Gallery and Press in 2005. I host monthly exhibitions, publish limited edition original fiction and incorporate other performance events. Through these varied modes of communication, I hope to engage a wider audience than is possible with just one medium. Though I’ve embraced the white-cube gallery model to an extent, the [...]
By — Radicalization, nourished by a critical spirit, is always creative. – Paulo Frieire I thought it would be an interesting experiment to invite peers in my larger social network, whose activist work—in anti-prison, education, media, LBGTQ health, and community arts circles—I admired and respected, to join me in devising a process that would fund informal, creative [...]
By — A kindly first grade teacher is not most people’s idea of a revolutionary, but that may be because the radical history of teacher organizing has been forgotten. In Chicago during the early 1900s, teacher and activist Margaret Haley led a fight for teachers’ rights as Vice President of the Chicago Federation of Teachers (CFT) with [...]
By — Upon my arrival to Chicago, a friend drove me through Cabrini Green. He explained its infamy, as well the city’s plan to demolish the decrepit public housing and turn the area into a mixed income community. A year later, I would set foot into this neighborhood for the first time, as I embarked on my [...]
By — Learning to Ride a BikeBeth Gutelius and Sarah Miller It’s difficult to know whether or not the number of people riding bikes in Chicago is growing, since no one counts or keeps track. Anecdotally, cyclists—including those writing this article—will tell you they see more and more folks, especially in the spring. Also growing rapidly are [...]
By — This summer, Anne Rapp of DePaul University took a class of four undergraduate students to the first ever United States Social Forum (USSF) in Atlanta, Georgia. AREA Chicago interviewed Rapp via email about the link between the classroom and the social movements that make up and support the USSF. You have said that the way [...]
By — AREA Chicago Interviews Rico Gutstein and Pauline Lipman (of Teachers for Social Justice) about some recent developments in social justice teacher networking in Chicago. This has been an incredible year already for radical education gatherings and networking opportunities in Chicago. There was the new Social Justice Student Expo at UIC, the Education for Liberation conference [...]
By — Paula Ladin is a special ed. teacher and a mother of three young children. She has recently taught at Columbia College in the Special Ed. Teacher Certification Program. She is currently trying to convince her husband to get some egg-laying chickens in their backyard and is looking for a job. (During our interview, Paula was [...]
By — Latino Union In July AREA Chicago interviewed Eric Rodriguez, an organizer on the Northwest side in Albany Park with Latino Union’s worker center at 3416 W. Bryn Mawr. Can you describe the process of how LU spreads information both internally and externally about a new challenges or policies? How does that internal spreading of information [...]
By — In a city where school shootings are cause for nationwide alarm, where teachers complain of policing more than educating and, in some neighborhoods, where the graduation rate hovers just over fifty percent, parents of all income levels, races and backgrounds are taking the reigns back from the public school system and deciding to teach their [...]
By — Daniel Tucker, AREA Chicago: This exhibition, just to give you a little context, is called The Pedagogical Factory: Exploring Strategies for an Educated City. It was organized by the Stockyard Institute. Area decided to initiate a series of programs entitled How We Learn that would go along with the exhibitions. The way this particular forum [...]
By — This essay was originally published in the summer 2007 issue of Critical Planning, the UCLA Journal of Urban Planning. (Vol. 14: Spatial Justice) Introduction Education theorists such as Michael Apple and Henry Giroux analyze education’s role in the perpetuation of the economic status quo in urban America (Giroux 1988; Apple 1991; 2001). Often called “reproduction [...]