Nations in Neighborhoods engages students and teachers in drawing on community resources as inspiration for artmaking. It asks the question: How can we learn about cultures around the world by doing research in our own communities and city? Students and their teachers leave their school buildings to explore neighborhoods where immigrant groups from the three regions they studied, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, settled and left their mark on the architecture, businesses, foods, festivals, languages, clothing, music and other cultural expressions. They visit grocery stores that serve particular ethnic communities and investigate the quantity and variety of particular foods and spices sold there, where these foods were originally grown, how they were transported to and from these countries, and how they reached the stores in the neighborhood.
They interview storekeepers and community residents about how these foods are prepared, the symbolic and personal associations of certain foods, and the family and community occasions where they are served. Students interview city and neighborhood residents both in the classroom and in community settings who have first-hand experience or expertise about the cultures or topics they are studying. Nations and Neighborhoods values the knowledge and experience of is that authority and expertise can be found At PS 117, for example, students worked with dance theater artist, Lu Yu, to create and perform a play that told the history of Japanese immigration to the United States. Students researched using a variety of resources: the internet, books, and documentary films, but they also interviewed Madeline Sugimoto, who lived with her family in a Japanese Relocation Camp during World War II. Madeline showed images of her father’s drawings of life in the camps and described, in vivid detail, her memories of when her family was told that they must leave their home and of her experiences living in the camp. Students created a scene about the Japanese-American internment drawing on their research and their interview with Ms. Sugimoto. Many of the resources included here are in the borough of Queens, where all of our partner schools are located. But we also visited sites outside of Queens: a professional print shop in Manhattan for a print-making workshop, The Capoeira Angola studio in Manhattan, the rare book collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We offer examples of the resources we used in these artist residency programs as examples of the kinds of resources that can be found in many communities and how they can be used to inspire students’ thinking and learning through artmaking.
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