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INNER, OUTER, AND IN-BETWEEN: WHY POPULAR CULTURE AND THE ARTS MATTER FOR URBAN YOUTH
The words the arts and popular culture dont often appear in the same sentence in education literature. Most often they are far from each otherpitted as opposite ideas and treated differently. Rubn A. Gaztambide-Fernndez sees the arts and popular culture as fields of practice that are remarkably similar. When put together both fields have the potential to matter greatly in the lives of urban youth.
The arts are often differentiated from popular culture in educational discourse by claiming that the first has inherent worth (Eisner, 1979), while the second is inherently worthless, even dangerous (Gore, 1987). A trip to the Royal Ontario Museum might be greeted with excitement by parents and teachers; a visit by rap artists Nas, Lady Sovereign, or Maestro might draw their skepticism or downright rejection, even if most adults actually have no idea what these rappers have to say. The arts are assumed to inspire beauty and introduce students to the world of aesthetics and expression, while popular culture is feared as the source of social ills, violence, and disengagement. As one view romanticizes and the other vilifies, both are simplistic and misguided, and both views miss the unique opportunities that open up when we engage the arts and popular culture as educational experiences. aesthetic traditions (Smith & Simpson, 1991). Arguments for engaging the arts and popular culture can be classified into three categories: Transferencewhich relies on the notion that skills developed in certain artistic forms will transfer to other academic domains (Burton, Horowitz, & Abeles, 2000); Student centredwhich assumes that drawing on students interests can improve pedagogy and generate more engagement in the classroom (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999); and Holisticwhich underscores self-expression and aesthetic experience as fundamental to the learning process (Greene, 1995). Each of these approaches has value, and ultimately, educators committed to the importance of the arts as well as popular culture in the lives of students should be able to mobilize those arguments that will prove most effective in their particular contexts. Yet, all of these approaches miss the crucial connections between the arts and popular culture as forms of cultural production and how they can be put to use in the search for equity and social justice in the lives of urban youth. As cultural critic Minh-ha (1990) cautions, reducing these practices to the status of instrument or fine style (p. 328) reduces their potential for opening new possibilities in the search for emancipatory pedagogies. Cultural production is a succinct and direct way of talking about the way we represent ourselves, our perceptions of others, and our ideas and experiences through symbols. It highlights the fact that neither the arts nor popular culture exist for themselves in a vacuum, but rather, we encounter and engage with them in socially and historically situated ways that require active rather than passive engagement thus the word production (Willis, 1990). These processes of cultural production (whether classified as art or popular culture) dont have inherent worth, they are not inherently good, inherently dangerous, or have value for their own sake. In fact, to assume that quality is inherent in any form inevitably leads to the drawing of boundaries between what is good or bad cultural production, and by default, to the hierarchical organization not only of cultural products, but of cultures themselves (Bourdieu, 1993). This implicit hierarchi-

Engaging Arts and Popular Culture

Some educators have recognized the fundamental relationship between the arts and popular culture and have shown how engaging them in tandem can open new windows and possibilities in the lives of inner city youth (e.g. Gallagher, 2007). Yet, when mainstream educators engage the arts and popular culture they do so separately and, typically, as means to other ends, mainly student achievement in other subject areas (Davis, 1996). Teachers may use rap as a way to teach language skills, or movies like Finding Nemo to teach about the ocean or biology. Some educators may buy into the idea that listening to Mozart will make their students smarter. Others might argue that exposure to the arts is good for its own sake, which usually means (at least implicitly) that it introduces students to the values of European

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cal ordering contradicts and undermines our commitments to cultural pluralism, equity, and social justice. Neither the arts nor popular culture can do anything on their own. Advocates of the arts are fond of making proclamations that position the arts as the agents and causes of particular effects (Efland, 1990). Advocacy statements often take forms such as: the arts open the imagination or the arts cause student engagement. Similar statements, though often with negative connotations, are made about popular culture. But neither the arts nor popular cultureor any other kind of cultural productiondoes anything on its own or in and of itself. People, that is, students and teachers engage in processes through cultural production with particular aims in mind. Because all sorts of processes are involved in cultural production, it is difficult if not impossible to predict the outcomes. In cultural production it is the process, not the outcome, that is of most concern. Engaging in processes of cultural production might open opportunities for students and teachers to engage in inner explorations, producing outer representation, and communicating in between the boundaries that encompass their everyday lives. By incorporating cultural production we can open educational spaces for inner exploration and redefinition through which urban youth can consider how they wish to identify and self-represent. Cultural production is an opportunity to consider the complexity of the relationships and circumstances that surround students in urban schools and of their own implication in how these evolve and manifest. By placing cultural production at the centre of educational experience in urban schools, we open the learning space for the possibility that students may rediscover themselves as social agents. I suggest that all other academic subjects should be understood in the service of students engagement in cultural production, not the other way around, as often happens. When students discover how numeric, scientific, and/or historical understandings are intimately related to how they understand and represent themselves, they are able to mobilize their learning in their own terms and, perhaps, for the betterment of their communities. This process of inner exploration, redefinition, and identification then becomes the hinge on which outer relationships are redefined and reconstructed. When youth in urban schools become the producers of their own representations through cultural production, they begin to take control of their outer representation and their relationships with others. Currently, mass media has a tremendous influence on how urban youth are represented to the public at large, and they are often left with little room to represent themselves (Buckingham, 2003). The representations of urban youth in mass media are not only skewed and fail to capture the complexity of their experience, but they serve the particular interests of social groups that actually benefit from such misrepresentations (Trend, 2003). Placing cultural production at the centre of educational experience opens up possibilities for urban youth to reorganize the symbolic content of their outer representations and reclaim new positions in relation to more powerful social groups. Neither inner redefinitions and understandings, nor outer representations and communications are ultimately static. It is in the exchange of representations and ideas that identifications are constructed and transformed, often simultaneously. Minh-ha (1990) argues that it is in the telling of a story that it comes alive and is ultimately transformed. Moving in between cultural boundaries that otherwise segregate and ultimately oppress, students who engage in cultural production have opportunities to dismantle those very boundaries. It is cultural productionthe active engagement in reorganizing the symbolic content of our social beingthat oppressive boundaries can be challenged in the search for social justice. This in between process requires the inner engagement with direct experience and the production of new outer representations. But without the exchange in between social and cultural boundaries, cultural production returns to mere art or simply popular culture; it loses its potential for social justice.

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This is no straightforward or easy endeavour. It is also in the process of engaging across boundaries that dynamics of appropriation, misrepresentation, and reductionism turn any cultural production into either instrument or fine style. This means that there is no end to the process of cultural production, mainly because it is just that, a process; a perpetual reconfiguration of symbols and ideas. Unless we make this process central to the educational experience of urban youth, we will never realize their potential. Minh-ha (1990) asks, how can one re-create without re-circulating domination? (p. 329). I propose that the histories and languages surrounding different kinds of cultural productions, such as those labeled arts or popular culture, open up windows of possibility in which youth in urban schools can rewrite themselves into their social contexts. This involves a process of inner search in which multiple positions are explored and expressed. These manifestations are shared with outer worlds in an attempt to reconfigure common relationships based on hierarchical social orders. In so doing, cultural production allows us to recreate ourselves without re-circulating dominant relations and views, and open new possibilities.

References

Alvermann, D. E., Moon, J. S., & Hagood, M. C. (1999). Popular culture in the classroom: Teaching and researching critical media literacy. Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production. New York: Columbia University Press. Buckingham, D. (2003). Media education: Literacy, learning, and contemporary culture. Medford, MA: Polity. Burton, J., Horowitz, R., & Abeles, H. (2000). Learning in and through the arts: The question of transfer. Studies in Art Education, 41(3), 228257. Davis, J. H. (1996, October 16). Why must we justify arts learning in terms of other disciplines? Education Week, 32, 34. Efland, A. (1990). A History of art education. New York: Teachers College Press. Eisner, E. (1979). The educational imagination. New York: Macmillan Publishing. Gallagher, K. (2007). The Theater of Urban: Youth and schooling in dangerous times. Toronto, London, Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. Gore, T. (1987). Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination. San Francisco: Josey-Bass, Inc. Minh-ha, T. (1990). Cotton and iron. In R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T. Minh-ha & C. West (Eds.), Out there: Marginalization and contemporary culture (pp. 327336). New York and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and New Museum of Contemporary Art. Smith, R., & Simpson, A. (Eds.). (1991). Aesthetics and art education. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Trend, D. (2003). Merchants of death: Media violence and American empire. Harvard Educational Review, 73, 285308. Willis, P. (1990). Common Culture: Symbolic work at play in the everyday cultures of the young. Boulder & San Francisco: Westview Press.

Our City, Our Schools: Urban Education as Context for Change