IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

In the context of chronic educational inequities affecting minoritized young people as well as increasingly exclusive and nation-centric education policies, this paper explores collaborative, community-inclusive forms of education that are primarily centred on the diverse city. Such approaches to education are based in urban networks resulting from an organic collaboration between formal (state-funded) schools and Third Sector organisations, community groups, local artists, as well as young people and their parents and carers. Through a discussion of findings from two original participatory research projects in London and Birmingham, UK, two of Europe’s most ethnically and religiously diverse cities, I show that community-inclusive urban education offers opportunities for innovative, engaging teaching and learning whilst having an immediate and deep-running positive impact across a school’s curriculum, and particularly on the subjects of values, history, citizenship and belonging. This is partly because community-inclusive education is based on a more empirically accurate reflection of the social reality of diverse urban communities, whose lives are at once local, national and transnational, thus transcending the traditional structures of national education. I argue, therefore, that collaborative, urban, community-inclusive education should feature by default in educational policymaking and leadership agendas. Conceptually, the paper uses theories of diaspora to account for the multiple linkages and networks across times, spaces and generations that define urban community-inclusive education for social justice.