Copyright 2009 by the National Art Education Asiociation

5(ud(esi'nj1rtf(/u(i7l/(in.-AJoumalaf Issues and Research

2009,51(1), 6-20

"Streets are liminalplaces to explore

the spaces ofgrowing up, to

negotiate hybrididentities, to

experiment withambivalence,

and set apublic identity."

The research project discussed inthis article was funded by the Vice-

Rector of Research at the UniveriitatAutónoma de Barcelona in academic

year 2005. My acknowledgment here isfor my colleague, Montserrat Rifà; the

teachers at Escola Collasso i Gil; andXavier Giménez, their an educator.

Destination Ravai Sud:A Visual Ethnography on Pedagogy,Aesthetics, and the Spatiai Experienceof Growing up Urban

L A U R A T R A F l - P R A T S

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

This article focuses on issues of childhood identity and urbanenvironment. It discusses how a performance art pedagogy inspiredby nomadic and relational aesthetics can provide a frameworkto promote creative learning experiences that address migratoryconditions and forms of public alienation lived by young peopletoday. As Lefebvre (1991) suggests, a group oniy can be recognizedas distinctive from others when they have the capacity to generatespace. Taking this idea as a starting point, the article holds aninterdisciplinary perspective and connects ideas from fields outsideart education including reconstructionist studies of childhood,contemporary aesthetics, and critical pedagogy. It studies howpublic placesand spaces are imagined and transformed from a child-sensitive perspective, and how children are public cultural agentsand creators of visual culture. This theoretical discussion is projectedinto the interpretation of a visual ethnographic study centered onvisual strategies, field narratives, and outcomes of migrant childrendocumenting their urban environment, El Raval Sud, an interculturalneighborhood situated in Barcelona's downtown.

Correspondence regarding this article may be sent to Laura Trafi-Prats,University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Peck School of the Arts, P.O. Box 413,Milwaukee, Wi S32Ot. E-mail; trafipra@uwm.edu

Trafi-Prats / Destination Raval Sud

This article discusses the role of arteducation in enhancing aestheticand 5ocial interconnections between

urban children and contemporary urbanenvironments. As Greene (1995) affirms, itrequires imaginative actions to teach children whosee differenîly from their teachers because suchchildren have been reared in poverty or have comefrom distant places. Both the critical re-viewingof the knowledge that we conceive to be foun-dational to our discipline and the involvementIn interdisciplinary endeavors are prerequisitesfor these imaginative actions. Following thisdirection, the article interweaves a network ofideas inspired by reconstructionist studies ofchildhood, nomadic and relational aesthetics, andperformance art pedagogy. The aim of this inter-disciplinarity is to serve a pedagogy centered onproducing knowledge in aaion, avoiding mysti-fication, and opening new beginnings in relationto which young people feel valued as partici-pants in dialogues and other instances of publicknowledge.

The article follows and extends Duncum's(2002) statement that art education should includemore consistent and realistic views of children. Arteducation should engage in more significant waysin current sociological and humanistic debates onchildhood identity Art education needs furtherexperimentation with pedagogies that overcomemodernist ideas, like seeing children as abstractand universal projects of development towardadulthood, to understand them instead as individualagents who create and modify cultural meaning.

The article is also inspired by ideas of envi-ronmental education and the role of the arts inteaching responsive and transformative peda-gogies that enhance the relationships betweensubjects and their local environments (e.g., McFee

a Degge, 1980; Blandy & Hoffman, 1993; Congdon,2004). Followers of this perspective maintainthat art education has a social responsibility inbettering the quality of shared environment andin educating children with different cultural back-grounds to creatively cope with the complexitiesof today's changing and fast-evolving societies(McFee & Degge, 1980). In this respect, place-based art pedagogies support all kinds of people'screative, affective, and aesthetic practices of place-making and spatial appropriation (Blandy, 2008),even when those practices challenge acquiredideas about what counts as art in modern andcontemporary history (Blandy & Congdon, 1998).They concentrate on local forms of knowledge, art,and aesthetics rather than on models of globalizedand standardized curriculum decided elsewhere(Graham, 2007).

TheSpatiality of Growing UpReconsrructionist studies ofchildhood emerged

as a response to the multiple dissonances existingbetween the material experiences of being a childin the actual world and the institutional forms anddiscourses framing childhood. Theorists workingin reconstructive practices of history, sociology,psychology, and pedagogy agree there exists notonly one form of childhood, but different child-hoods and children, existing as specifically locatedsocio-constructions and subject positions (Aries,1962;Jencks, 1996; Cannella, 1997; Duncum, 2002;Cannella, Kincheloe & Anijar, 2002). "Biological factsof infancy are but the raw material upon whichcultures work to fashion a particular version ofbeing a child" (Jencks, 1996, p. 20). For this reason,reconstructionist studies contest language andimages that naturalize, generalize, and globalize adominant Western understanding of childhood asan innocent adult-protected experience. This is adiscourse that emerged in the 18th century and

Studies in Art Education / Volume 51 , No. 1

progressed through the later development of disci-plines like pediatrics, psychology, and pedagogy,which centered on the creation of a distinct typeof specialized knowledge about children. In thishistory, what stands for adult protection some-times can be better re-named as regulation orcontrol. While children are given rights and duties,they are also emptied of all responsibility, politicalagency, or autonomy. Often children are spokenfor through the voices of their parents, teachers,doctors, and other adult representatives, whiletheir own voices are rarely heard.

Reconstructionist studies of childhood insteadsee children as competent agents and activecreators of their own lives (Rasmussen & Smidt,2003).Theycallforan increased reflexivity betweenadult researchers and pedagogues and youngerparticipants. This reflexivity aims to displace thecontrol of adults upon childhood's knowledgeby envisioning ways to collaborate with children,that acknowledge children's different views andthat help researchers and pedagogues to findnew forms of knowledge and representation thathelp us speak on behalf of young people withoutmanipulating their voices (Aitken, 2001).

In postindustrial metropolis organized throughcapitalist hierarchies, cities function as land-scapes of power (Matthews, 2003) where publicspaces are designed for the comfort and use ofmiddle class adult professionals. Life is spatiallyseparated between production (work) and repro-duction (home). Children are either kept at homeor sheltered in specifically designed spaces-for-childhood. Children in the street are barely under-stood anymore as a community of risk; they areotherwise represented as the risk itself This repre-sentation especially affects working class and/orethnically and sexually diverse childhoods.

The city as a landscape of power operatesthrough a fragmentation of space and time.Children grow up learning toorganize and managethe time-space itineraries that set the separatedspheres of produaion and reproduction. Sincein globalized capitalism the times of production

are becoming more and more flexible, the timeto come back home to the rituals of reproductionhas been increasingly delayed. Families are obligedto buy private services, where institutionalizedothers cover parcels ofthe time for care and play.Consequently, families and children devote animportant part of their lives commuting betweendisconnected islands where supposedly safeactivities for children take place. How famiiies andchildren decide on these itineraries and places,and how children enjoy more or less freedom ofmovement and decision to organize their ieisuredetermines spatial conceptions that wiii becomerelevant for the rest ofthe child's life and will shapehis/her own desire to find a way into his/her ownplaces (Zeiher, 2003; Aitken, 2001).

Reconstructionist studies of childhood advocatethat forms of spatial occupation of the street,including the performance of usual itinerariesand social encounters in the neighborhood, isan essential element for the growth of children'ssocial identity as well as their senses of locationand sociability (Christensen & O'Brien, 2003).Streets are liminal places to explore the spacesof growing up, to negotiate hybrid identities, toexperiment with ambivalence, and set a publicidentity (Matthews, 2003). In order to make urbanknowledge, representation, and change to bechild-sensitive, researchers and pedagogues arecollaborating with children to gain knowledgeand include them as co-authors of their studies.

Nomadic and Relational AestheticsIt makes sense to interconnect contemporary

issues about childhood and spatiaiity with theoriesof nomadic and relational aesthetics because bothencompass critical reconsiderations of modernistnotions of belonging, emplacement, movement,and identities and can support the transitionfrom a universal idea of the child to situated andevolving conceptions of childhood,

Nomadic aesthetics areconcerned with creativejuxtapositions, unexpected encounters, and formsof parody that open intermediate spaces within

Trafi-Prats/ Destination Raval Sud

dominant cultures. They constitute a creativespace to be strangers to ourselves, a practiceof healthy skepticism toward mother tongues,and permanent identities or places of origin andadscription, Nomadic aesthetics encompass acritical, anti-capitalist idea of movement andspatial occupation that gives visibility to marginalicientities and practices (Braidotti, Î994).

In the age of globalization and digital tech-nologies, space-time distances may have shrunkbut current imperial politics make evident thatfreedom of movement is a privilege, not a choice,which does not belong to everyone equally (Kwon,2004). Subjects and communities from differentparts of the world are displaced against their will,or are kept in walled territories, refugee camps, orprisons with no possibility of movement (Durrant& Lord, 2007}. Nomadic artists experiment withnarrative as a vehicle for weaving stories of frag-mentation, representing paradoxes like the desireto access specific places and the impossibilityof entering or inhabiting them (Saloul, 2007). Itseems that the experience of growing up in citieswith limited or very controlled experiences ofmovement and transition contains many similar-ities with other geopolitical forms of spatial control.While the voices of children who are shaped bymigratory experiences or who suffer social alien-ation are not heard in large public forums, theydo have the need to express and connect contra-dictory, complex, and disjoined experiences.

Nomadic aesthetics favor spatial metaphorslike tracing and mapping that entail reflectiveand alternative practices of movement and tran-sition. Space in nomadic aesthetics is a relationalspecificity made of dialogical tensions betweendifferent spatial experiences. It is about thesubjective negotiation of the possibilities openedby new fluidities together with the ruptures anddisconnections that those provoke (Kwon, 2004).Artists interested in the representation of thisform of spatiality re-create localities "shaped byglobal dynamics, operating in different domains,so that every location must be understood as the

provisional effect of its relation with other loca-tions, and with the global processes linking them'{Hoving,2007,p.l79).

Nomadic aesthetics and relational aestheticshave points of conneaion because both envisionalternative spatial and social relations. Relationalaesthetics are a political project that "draws inspi-ration from the flexible processes governingordinary life" (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 47). Relationalaesthetics change modernist notions of valueassociated with the object and the hermeneu-tical mastery of the artist and the critic to focus onrelational, durational, and cumulative processesof exchange and dialogue. This seems consistentwith a model of research centered on the repre-sentation of urban space and life that incorporatesformsof doing based on conversation, negotiation,and collaboration between adults and children.Here adult researchers, like the artists working onrelational projects, might need to give up on theirgained expertise and professional technique toengage with other forms of representation andworld-making that are more child-sensitive.

Relational aesthetics are more concerned withformations than with forms. In this sense, artistsworking with relational art projects are not onlydrawing inspiration from the worid of art and itstraditional disciplines, but from modeis that comefrom the social fabric and its ways of making. AsBourriaud (2002) affirms, "[Artl refers to values thatcan be transposed into society" (p, 18), Relationalaesthetics bring the opportunity to see children associal actors whose cultural production does notbelong to a lower cultural rank (child art). Instead,young people collaborate with adults artists/teachers/researchers to bring emancipatoryinsights into productions of art and urban space.

Performance Art PedagogyBoth Nomadic and relational aesthetics can

be connected to what Garoian (1999) calls perfor-mance art pedagogy, that concentrates on "thetransformation of the artist/teacher and spectator/student from the object to the subject of cultural

Studies in An Education/y/o\ume 51, No. 1

history [through] ... liberatory forms of aaion"(p.57}. Garoian's performance art pedagogy chal-lenges the mono-culrurality, standardization,and prescription that characterize the places andspaces where learning takes place, like the schoolor the museum. He considers that the primarysource of pedagogy comes from students' livesand cultural perspectives. Bringing non-academic,non-dominant intercultural and cross-disciplinaryideas into these two institutional contexts is a wayof disrupting their pre-assumed purposes. Garoianviews pedagogy as a collaborative constructionof pubiic discourse and practicai democracy inwhich cultural agency and memory cannot besacrificed for art's sake, curriculum standards, ordiscipiinary traditions. !n this sense, pedagogicalpractice is made of participation, interculturaiity,and cross-disciplinary dialogues. This inter-socialtransformative quality connects performance artpedagogy with relational aesthetics.

Performance art pedagogy situates the pres-entness of the living body as a site where culturalcodes are inscribed, lived, and can be transformedthrough the language of culturally responsive andreiationai actions. Knowledge does not precedethe learning actions, but knowledge happensin-the-making and by learning to think experi-mentally about important culturai transforma-tions {Ellsworth, 2005). Performance art pedagogyembraces the indeterminacy of learning outcomesand considers that interpretation is a non-fixed,situated practice of meaning production (Garoian1999}. Learning is not only or mainly aboutcognitive levels or patterns but about sensationaland affective knowledge made of felt experi-ences happening in transitional spaces and timesbetween knowing and not-knowing (Ellsworth,2005}. ir is in relation to the refusal of dichotomousthinking and the acknowiedgment that learningis not oniy based upon logicai statements butnon-logical, indeterminate, undecidable, contra-dictory, unfinished experiences that performanceart pedagogy links with nomadic aesthetics, and

its pedagogical use of art as a site of productivedisjunctions, paradoxes, and moving identities.

A Visual Ethnography Centered onChildhoods, Migration, and UrbanSpace

Inspired by the framework of social, aesthetic,and pedagogical ideas discussed above, thesecond part of the article presents a visual ethnog-raphy done with two classes of 6th-grade children(40 children with five working groups per class)attending an urban intercuitural school, an artspecialist, two course tutors, and two researchersfrom Universität Autónoma de Barcelona. Theauthor of this article is one of the two researchers.in this study, tiie street becomes a pedagogicalsite and a place of transition, occupation, culturalencounter, visual representation, and sensationalpedagogy. These actions challenge modernistbinarydivisions betweenchildhood and adulthoodby situating young peopie as the central subjectsof symbolic and spatial production.

Socio-historical Context of the ResearchThe scenario of this case study is an elementary

school located inthecoreofEIRavalSud,a historicalneighborhood in Barcelona's old downtown.Barcelona is well-known for its modern architecturewith its bohemian bourgeoisie flare that attractsmany across Europe and the world. However, themodern history of the city is also represented byits growing industry and the massive migrationof rural popuiation to the metropolis at the turnof the last century. This working class migrationbecame key in the transformation of Barcelona asa cosmopolitan European center.

With the massive arrival of the newcomers,working class neighborhoods expanded in the city.El Raval Sud was one of them. Its landscape was apeculiar combination of very poorly designed resi-dential buildings for the urban proletariat, artisanworkshops, hostels, charity hospitals, orphanages,clandestine brothels, and religious churches andconvents constructed in earlier periods. Its locationwithin the perimeter of the old medieval walls

10 Trafi-Prats / Destination Raval Sud

made El Raval Sud a narrow, dark, damp, and oftenunhealthy living spacefor the urban poor Althoughthe economical conditions have improved sincethen and urban reformation has affected largesections, El Raval Sud still shows many character-istics of this early working class urban structure(Villar, 1997).

During the last 30 years. El Raval Sud, like manyother metropolitan centers in Europe, has becomethe site of arrival and the home to internationalimmigrants coming from Magreb, Sub-Saharancountries,theHindupeninsula,and South America.These irregular and regular citizens are the newoccupants of the old working class apartments,coexisting now with new building constructionsfor an emerging creative class and liberal middleclass professionals. While some see this heteroge-neity and hybridization as quintessential elementsthat define cosmopolitism, others interpret this asa process of gentrification whose goal is to keep ElRaval Sud with a tolerable and appealing level ofcultural diversity (Goytisoio, 2004). In this context,immigrant is a political and social constructionthat does not apply to all travelers setting footin a new land, or other bodies in transition, butthose coming from the so-called Third Worldcountries, who enter through the back door, withno visa, a lack of skills, and barely any money intheir pockets.They are the most vulnerable in thewhole social structure (Delgado, 2008). The publicschool where this visual ethnographic study tookplace has 96% of students connected to thisrecent migratory history, and 4% of students wholive with enduring forms of social disadvantagethat are a product of earlier histories of marginalityin El Raval Sud.

Goals of the Research

The goals of the research are;• To create a social and relational space of artistic

production and interpretation that connectsthe classroom with the neighborhood andthe street. The research draws inspiration froma model of performance art pedagogy based

on rethinking how we (children and adults)relate with ourselves, others, art, and the publicworld and to engage with anything and anyonethat is different from ourselves (Garoian, 1999;Ellsworth, 2005).

• To experiment with a model of curriculumthat alters the linearity of the times and placesof learning, as well as the disciplinary depart-mentalization of knowledge, and to promotea model of learning based on connecting artwith other forms of knowledge and with thereal-world experiences of children. This is alsoa model of curriculum that defies the standard-ization and globalization of knowledge andfocuses on local webs of relations (Graham,2007),

• To produce visual-ethnographic knowledgethat narrates the process and outcomes of anomadic/relationai aesthetic that challengesmodernist and canonic approaches to art andartists and avoids representing children as meredepositories of artistic content (Kerster, 2004) bysetting art in a long-term dialogue with currentsocial issues and formations connected to thelives and interests of young people (Bourriaud,2002).

Visual EthnographyThe methodology used in this research is

a refiective approach to visual ethnography,According to MacDougall (1995), visual ethnog-raphy rethinksanthropology'sorientationasa disci-pline dominantiy conducted by words to considerother forms of anthropological knowledge. In thissense, visual ethnography is not a copy, substitute,or complement to written ethnography but analternate form of representation that focuses onthose parts of culture that cannot be accessed byjust the use of words (Pink. 2002). As Berger (1977)affirms,"Seeing comes before vwords... and estab-lishes our place in the surrounding world" (p.7).Therefore, the research uses the conceptual andanalytic possibilities of visual texts to elaboratecritical insight on the cultural relations between

Studies in An Education / y/o\ume 51 , No. 1

childhood, relational aesthetics, nomadic iden-tities, and metropolitan conditions of life in ElRaval Sud. This critical insight relies on the capacityof visual images "to reveal what is hidden in theinner mechanisms of the ordinary and the takenfor granted [as well as] the connections betweenthings of different scope and scale" (Knowles &Sweetman, 2004, p. 7), like children's cultures andtheir urban imaginaries.

According to Pink (2002), visual ethnographicnarratives aim to represent how participantsconstrua different meanings at different pointsof the ethnographic research, analysis, and repre-sentations. Following this idea, the researchconcentrates on three different types of visualethnographic narratives;

1. The archive of visual strategies: RobertFrank as a case for relational aesthetics. Thisethnographic narrative reconstructs how theresearchers produced meanings about RobertFrank's photographs that connected with chil-dren's lives and memories of migration. Theyproduced this narrative through conversationsand collaborative research at the exhibitionand the library before the field experience. Thevisual ethnographic narrative expanded duringthe field experience through conversationswith 6th-grade students both at the museumand the classroom.

2. A video-narrative of knowledge-in-the-making as a shared cultural process betweenchildren and adults Jhis narrative intendedto capture the process of knowledge-in-the-making during the interventions in the field(the museum, the classroom, and the streets).The outcome is a 10-minute video-docu-mentary. Figure 1 shows a linear arrangementof selected stills from this video.

3. The montage of the ¡mages and textsproduced by two groups ofóth-gradestudents. This is a collection and connectionof children's texts and images that representmultiple and dissonant points of views

concerning the urban themes that childrendocumented.

The following two sections discuss narratives

#1 and #3 in more detail. Aspects of narrative #2

are incorporated within these two sections.

Frank'5 Relational Archive of VisualStrategies

At the time when the fieldwork of this casestudy was developed, Barcelona's Museum ofContemporary Art (MACBA), located in El RavalNord, was showing Robert Frank Storylines. Thisexhibition presented "the creative journey takenby this artist from the 1940s to the present day"(Todoif & Brookman, 2005). We constructed analternative non-linear, non-chronological journeyto the exhibition by focusing on specific visualstrategies present in Frank's work. Knowles andSweetman (2004) define visual strategies as theuses that the image can be put to both representand construct realities.

The focus on visual strategies had a doubleintent. First, we wanted to produce a relationalspace between Robert Frank's biography and howthis affected his own view of public life in a foreigncountry, the United States, and children's life expe-riences of migration and urbanity in El Raval Sud.And second, we expected that those conceptsand practices emerged and discussed during thelooking and talking at the museum would transferand affect children's photographic practices in thestreet (see Figure D.The itinerary concentrated inthe exploration of the following two visual strat-egies; the migratory point of view and the motionpicture.

The Migratory Point of View. Migration isconsidered an essential visual strategy shapingFrank's point of view and picture-making. Forinstance, Mitchell (2005) has interpreted TheAmericans (1958), Frank's most celebrated pieceof work, as the traumatic view of an immigrant'experiencing his newly adopted homeland asan alien civilization" (p. 278). The personal andcontextual forces that propelled Frank to travel

12 Trafi-Prats 7 Destination Ravai Sud

Figure I.Video stillsrepresenting aspectsof the field process:conversations in themuseum, actions ofphoto-documentation Inpublic spaces, discussionand selection of imagesin the classroom.

Studies in An Education/y o\üme5^, No. 1 13

I do not like dirty streets. I do not like narrow streets. You can see more peopleand more happiness in the wider streets... (Yuni)

Raval is a really hig barrio. It is kind of dirty because people dump garbage in thestreet, and also some men sleep outside... (Maribel)

The people who live in el Raval is different. They are from different countries Mo-rocco, l^kistan, Rumania, Spain, the South and East of Africa, England and India.

Also many tourists from different countries come to visit the city. {Abdelnor)

There is an enormous iron cat in La Rambla del Raval. The people who live therehave a great time because the bigger parties always take place there (Laura)

Figure 2. Montage #1 : Places of work aiong Calle Sant Pau. 6th grade students, class 2005,Escola Collaso i Gil.

14 Trafi-Prats / Destination Raval Sud

across different countries in Europe, Peru, andfinally the United States, his new homeland, wereimplicitiy presented in the exhibition narrative. Wedecided to concentrate the itinerary on creating arelational space centered on discussing how Frankproduced images that showed a migratory pointof view. As Garoian {1999} afnrms, the rationalewas to deconstruct and recompose art in waysthat the expressive character of Frank's photosand his personal concerns as an artist found aparallel with the lives, desires, and imaginaries ofour children in order that they could see their ownmigratory experience "within a context of history"(p. 198}.

The Mofion Picture. Differing from earlierphoto-documentalists like Cartier-Bresson whocentered on the capture of decisive momentsthat summarized a totaiity within one sole image,Frank opposed the idea that one single instantcould represent the complexity of life. Focusingon different examples through the exhibition, weobserved how Frank worked with highly orches-trated sequences of images''that collapsed or evensubverted time, to present multiple and layeredmeanings, to elicit numerous and conflictingemotional responses"(Greenough, 1994). Childrenwere asked to capture public life in El Raval Sudalso in terms of narratives and sequences ofimages showing contrasts and differences thatwere meaningful to them (see Video Stills E, F, G,and H in Figure 1}.

Like other photographers of the iate •40s and'50s, Frank experimented with the motion pictureand the idea that the point of view can move withthe flow of cosmopolitan iife, having as a resuitan embodied representation of the ephemeral,random, and transitional character of urbanity(Kozloff, 2002}. The motion picture style allowedchildren to experiment with movable and volatilepoints of view whiie they occupied and transitedcity itineraries that were familiar and attractive tothem.

Raval's Montage of ImagesThe two montages presented in this final

section account for the multiplicity of readings andviews that acted together in the final outcomes ofchildren's seiected urban themes, photographs,and writings {see Figures 2 and 3}.

The anaiyticai perspective in reading these twomontages is inspired by Rasmussen and Smidt{2003}, who afñrm that in anaiyzing chiidren'sphotographs of their neighborhoods one can gainthree differenttypesofknowledge: visual, physical,and narrative. The visuai concerns the photographand what it is shown and how it is shown. Thephysical knowledge shows the embodied andlived perception of the photographed reality. Thenarrative knowledge is related to the statements,anecdotes, and stories that children project intothese photographs.

Montage # T; Places of Work along Calle SantPau. During the field trip to Robert Frank's exhi-bition, children were attracted to the series ofimages presented in the section named Detroit1957, which showed the life in and around a FordMotor factory. While looking at those images, weread a paragraph from a short story depictingworking and living spaces in El Raval Sud, and wediscussed possible correspondences between thepictures and the narrative. These conversationsseemed to have had an impact on one of theworking groups that selected "Working Spaces inCalle Sant Pau"as their theme for the photo docu-mentation of public life in El Raval Sud.

Children in this group were interested in repre-senting the actions of people whiiethey work. Theycame into different businesses and negotiated thepossibiiity of taking pictures. Children asked theworkers who agreed to participate not to look atthe camera and act as if they were doing their jobs.Days later when the group had the opportunityto look at the resulting photo-contacts, differentmembers had varied opinions on how to organizetheir visuai sequences (see Video Stills I and J inFigure 1 ). Some of the children in the group wereespeciaily interested in putting together a linear

Studies in An Education / \/o\ume St, No, 1 15

People work constructing new streets and buildings. They also work in stores,bars, calling centers, hotels. Many workers are from other countries. People also

come from other countries to take photos of Raval (Alex)

In Raval you can find many restaurants that sell shawarnia. There is a sandwichstore called Atlas, where they cook very tasty stuff. There are many stores selling

phones, and also many bars (Kaula)

Most of the stores are from Pakistan or Morocco (Ghizlane)

>RAVAia.[31HII

Figure 3. Montage #2: Representing transitions and situations. 6th grade students, class 2005,Escola Collaso i Gil.

16 Trafi-Prats / Destination Raval Sud

series of images showing the different momentsof a work action. Some others preferred to showsituations that were fun and worth remembering.Some others wanted to put together sequencesof places where they go to eat or buy regularly,connecting existing social bonds to their inventedtheme.

Physical Knowledge. From a physical per-spective, children used play and fun to createan alternative mapping/itinerary of Calle SantPau. Taking pictures of all these different workplaces along the street that they walk everyday atdifferent times was a practice of seeing this spacedifferently and of making childhood culture visiblein the public realm.

Visual Knowledge. From a visual point of viewthat concentrates on what is shown in the photo-graphs, we can see that the children's focus on thetheme of work demonstrates that children nego-tiate their social identities by not only relating tochildhood culture and children acquaintances butby experiencing, from their own point of view, therealities defining the world of adults (Mathews,2003). The photographs in Figure 2 show in aconcrete manner how children gained knowledgeof these different places by exploring given envi-ronments, items, persons that were interestingto them. It is difficult to separate the visuality ofthese images from their physicality. The framesshow specific senses of belonging, transition,occupation, and proximity. Some were takenfrom outside of the store, because their owners oremployees decided not to participate (see photosof Raval Döner restaurant and butchery shop inFigure 2). These certainly differ from images thatwere taken inside with the consent of the owners.In these images you could see the proximity andthe comfort both of adults and children interactingtogether in these places. See in Figure 2 the threeimages in the hair salon that intend to show theprocess of cutting hair. This is a transcription ofwhat happened in the field:

(A group of children enter the barber's shop.)Israel: Hi, we are from the school. We wouldlike to take some photos.Assistant: Of my face or of the place?Vunoida.'Ofyou working.

(Assistant laughs while owner walks in.)/^ss/sionfrJuri they want to take some photos,it's for schoolwork.

(Owner receives a phone call. Children waitgrouped in front of him. Owner looks at thechildren while he is talking over the phone.)

Fabio. Can I sit there?(Fabio points at the chair in front of the mirror.Israel also addresses the owner.)

Israel: You can do like you are fixing his hair.(Before the owner takes a decision, Yunaida sitsin the chair. Owner hangs up and walks towardthe chair, and puts a robe on Yunaida. He startscombing her hair. Owner smiles.)

Yunaida: Please, do not cut my hair!Owner: Nooo.

(The rest of the children take lots of shots of thesituation. [Rifà & Trafi-Prats, 2005])Narrative Knowledge. From a narrative point

of view we can see how Alex's statement focuseson the experience of taking the photos, the thingsthat can be photographed in Calle Sant Pau, andthe different people, like tourists, that take photo-graphs in el Raval. Kaula's statement concentrateson the things represented in the photographs thatshe likes, and more specifically, food. Ghizlane'sstatement about the fact that many businesses areowned by individuals from the Hindu peninsulaand the Magreb region is more a re-affirmation ofthe intercultural character of the neighborhood,where different ethnic communities are associatedwith different types of jobs and forms of publiclife, than a negative remark or complaint. (Read allthese statements in Figure 2.) The different char-acters appearing in these pictures are not shownas aliens or immigrants; they are represented asdignified individuals performing ordinary tasks inthe daily life of their neighborhood, Most oftenurban experiences and social interconnections

Studies in An Education / Volume 5}, No. 1 17

in the metropolis defy this fixed and monolithicmodel of identity associated with a place of originto favor instead hybridized cultural experiencesand nomadic and evolving models of identity.

Montage #2: Representing transitions andsituations. During the field trip to Robert Frank'sexhibition, we spent time observing and discussingthe series named From the Bus (1958). In thisparticular series, Frank uses the camera as a deviceto capture different situations while traveling in aNewYork bus. The results are an evidence of flyingsituations and moving sights and bodies.

When looking at these images, childrenshowed interest in knowing how the images weredone. They discussed if they were real or fake situ-ations while performing the possible situationsand actions that the photographer did to takethose (see Video Stills C, D in Figure 1 ).

Physical Knowledge. One of the workinggroups decided to base their photo-documen-tation on people walking and doing things in thestreet (see Figure 3). The idea of capturing frag-ments of situations, and moving realities, is veryperceptible in these images. The different pointsshow what the very focus of the image is. Whenthis focus is a tiny dog, children cropped the headsof the people to iocate the dog and the streetfloor in the center of the image. When childrenrepresent someone walking through a street, theysituate themselves as followers or crossers-

Visuat Knowledge. The photos demonstratethat children are using Frank's moving picturestrategy. Some photos show dynamic framingsand moving subjects because children took theimages while walking and following people.They used Frank's aesthetics in relational waysto experiment with new ways of viewing andrepresenting what is familiar to them. Some otherimages show forms of occupying the space andactions that happen in the street like sleepingoutside, doing construction work, meeting withothers, and so forth.

Narrative Krjowledge. Children's statementsshow different feelings, narratives, and anecdotesabout sociability and coexistence in El Raval Sud.Some are more positive than others, and we cansee how children worry about poverty, publicbehavior, and healthy spaces, but also feel part of acommunity to which specific spaces contribute tothat feeling. All statements shovy that children careabout the spaces where they live and that thosespaces affect who they are.

Photographs and texts in these two montageshave a highly experiential content.They are a proofof the different and specific perspectives, pointsof view, and body perceptions through whichchildren show that the neighborhood is a "sensed,perceived, and experienced reality that it is storedwithin the child's body ... The body and its move-ments are vital building blocks in making meaningof the environment. The creation of meaning isbasically a physical manifestation" (Rassmussen &Smidt, 2003).

ConclusionsInterdisciplinary efforts are needed to construct

a model of art education centered on relations andtransformative actions with young people growingup in changing and challenging urban environ-ments. The knowledge that we ofiien considerfoundational for art education needs to be trans-formed to adopt a pedagogical perspectivecentered on the cultures, memories, and interestsof young people whose social, cultural, andgeographical biographies significantly differ fromthe ones of their adult caregivers.

In this sense, it is urgent that art educationparticipates more actively in contemporarydiscussions about childhood occurring in thesociological, pedagogical, anthropological, andhistorical fields. The actualities of contemporarychildren, their visual culture experiences, and thegeopolitical complexity of the world where theygrow up are forcing us to review beheld concep-tions of universalism, ethnocentrism, innocence,dependence, or spatial-temporal unity, through

18 Trafi-Prats / Destination Raval Sud

whicii modern disciplines, like art education, have environments. Art educators interested in social

conceived childhood. A defining trait of the new justice and visual culture need to engage in imagi-

world order is that the commonality of public native actions that cultivate forms of aesthetic rela-

space is being challenged by corporate privati- tionality between children and the spaces where

zation. As a result of this movement, children are they live. Among these imaginative aaions is the

pushed out of the streets and shuttled to different use of contemporary art, collaborative research

private realms of activity. This situation contrasts praaices, and visual narratives as a way of partici-

with the reality that year after year more children pation, exploration, and transformation of art,

move to metropolitan centers. Currently, 75% of adult-children relations, and urban realities,

the world's population of children lives in urban

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