Nomadic Teaching, Vagabond Dreaming: An Examination of the Spaces That Schools Might Become

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size NotesThere's something worth saying here about the power of naming in relation to the creation of reality. One need only look to the names of the fifty-three neighborhood schools closed in the city of Chicago in 2013 (to be replaced, one must recall, by charters later authorized by the Mayor and his board) to think about the power of history and narrative (indeed, place) that is being lost. Gone are Altgeld Elementary (named for John Altgeld, a progressive governor of the state of Illinois who pardoned the men convicted of the Haymarket bombing), Bethune Elementary (named for Dr. Mary Jane McLeod Bethune, among other things a member of the Black Cabinet of the FDR administration), Garvey Elementary (after, of course, the great Black Nationalist, Marcus Garvey) and Paderewski Elementary (named for the Polish pianist and composer, Ignacy Paderewski). All of these people, these historical figures who once meant something to the neighborhoods who named their schools after them, come to fade away as does the connection to place that used to exist through the monikers of other schools like Marconi, Goldblatt, and Fermi. They are quickly supplanted and replaced by franchises: Uno, Noble, and LEARN, which strive for a flat homogeneity. Their history matters little because there is no history; their names, like the names of their students, who become mere metrics on a page, mean nothing more than to signify expansion, replication, replacement.