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Visual Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2, September 2007
Through city students’ eyes: urban students’ beliefs about
school’s purposes, supports and impediments
KRISTIEN MARQUEZ-ZENKOV
Studying the ‘visible curriculum’ of city schools in the
United States cannot begin with the assumption that
students and teachers are, in fact, present in or graduating
from these institutions. In the city setting in which this
article’s photographic investigation took place high school
dropout rates have remained at or above 50% for better
than three decades. Rather than concentrating narrowly on
the curriculum of what can be seen in school, the research
on which this article reports began with a photographic
inquiry into urban youths’ foundational perceptions of
school itself, as well as the impediments and supports to
school success of which these students are aware. This
inquiry reveals some of the reasons behind the multigenerational community disengagement that have led to
the strained relationship to schools represented by these
graduation rate statistics. Grounded in critical pedagogy,
‘new literacy’ and visual sociology traditions, this study
looked to visually based mechanisms for research tools with
which city students are already proficient. The findings
presented here suggest that not only can these tools provide
previously inaccessible data on school detachment, they can
also supply insights into what school means to these youth
and what might support their re-engagement with these
institutions.
INTRODUCTION
Figure 1 (‘Trying to be LeBron’) is a photograph of a
youth who played basketball regularly at a recreation
centre in the near west side city neighbourhood where
Javon,1 a student who has participated in a photography
and literacy project over the past three years, was then
employed in one of his two part-time jobs. The boy
FIGURE 1. ‘Trying to be LeBron’. This picture shows that your education can take you further than a basketball. Every day I watch kids come to the recreation
centre and pretend to be basketball players such as LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Kobe Bryant, thinking that this can be the way to riches and fame. I
know, because I thought the same way. I tell them every day that school is more important than trying to be LeBron. I tell them to be yourself, and that
education is the key to success instead of basketball. (Von)
ISSN 1472–586X printed/ISSN 1472–5878 online/07/020138-17 # 2007 International Visual Sociology Association
DOI: 10.1080/14725860701507099
Through city students’ eyes
pictured here was a sixth grader, and Javon – or Von as
he was more commonly known – was a senior in high
school who had moved past his own dreams of going
straight from high school athletics to playing as a
professional athlete in the National Basketball
Association (NBA). In fact, Von had not played sports
for his high school teams over the previous two years,
due to a combination of academic, athletic and
economic factors. His goals for himself and these youth
now were different – things like graduating from high
school, going to college, and working in one of the
downtown high-rise business hubs that he could
see across the industrial valley from his neighbourhood.
While Von worked and played regularly with the youth
at the centre, he also tried to give them some perspective
on the place of sports in their present and future lives.
He did not challenge his charges’ idolization of athletic
stars, but he urged them to consider the value of school
and to pursue their academic responsibilities with the
same verve that they were committing to hoops. But
Von also had other concerns for his life and those of the
young adults with whom he was then closest.
Photographed sitting at a desk in a high school
classroom, Elton was, in Von’s words, one of his ‘only
best friends’. The symbol he was ‘throwing’ with his
hands was not, as many would suspect, a gang sign.
Instead, it was a triangle, representing the trinity of
himself, Von and a third friend, Marvin – who was
another of the youth who had been involved with this
photography/literacy project the previous several years.
Von and Marvin were still in high school, still steadily
pursuing that elusive diploma, and still more or less on
track for entering college the next year. Von described
the picture he had taken of Elton (‘Friendship’) with the
following paragraph:
This is one of my only best friends besides
Marvin. We always said that we were going to
build a dynasty and nothing could break us up.
And with the recent problems Elton is having,
we try to be there for him and one another if we
have a problem. So the symbol Elton is showing
in this picture means a lot to us. We don’t want
to lose another friend to death, streets, or jail.
Elton, on the other hand, had begun to make different
choices. His attendance at school had grown erratic and
he had become involved with ‘selling on Madison’ – the
simple phrase these youth used to describe dealing drugs
139
on a part-time basis, to earn a bit of extra cash, for new
clothes, phones, a car, for something to do, or to help
out financially at home. With good reason, Von was
worried that Elton would become one of many of his
friends and acquaintances whose unsanctioned
‘extracurricular’ activities would lead to his eventual
dropping out of high school or, worse, to the juvenile
justice system or physical harm.
Von’s images and words are examples of the types of
photographs and reflections that resulted from the
‘Through Students’ Eyes’ project on which this article
reports. In the pages that follow, the author details and
analyzes what Von and other students – a small sample
of one generation of city high school students in the
United States – literally saw as school’s purposes,
impediments and supports. These youths’ photographic
and written responses provide insights into their
relationships to school, and the findings shared here
might influence city teachers’ and teacher educators’
practices, as well as policymakers’ and curriculum
specialists’ thinking, as we collectively endeavour to
make schools places that matter to future cycles of urban
youth.
CONTEXTS AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Von’s concerns about Elton’s rejection of school and
prioritizing of other activities (e.g. sports or street
trades) reflect a reality with which the majority of urban
high school teachers in the United States are familiar.
Many city educators have heard students’ laments about
the irrelevance of the texts teachers use, the assignments
they require, and the very nature of the institution by
which they are employed. In some settings, these
students’ complaints are merely bothersome or can be
dismissed as this generation’s academic rite of passage:
how many of us survived high school classes in spite of
teachers’ quirky personalities, mind-numbing methods
or apparent lack of concern about students’ engagement
with, or mastery of, the lessons they were presenting?
But in the author’s city setting and in many others
around the United States, where high school dropout
rates persistently register at 50% and higher, these
articulated grievances are the proverbial tips of an
iceberg of a troubling, multi-generational lack of school
engagement (Federation for Community Planning 2003;
Greene and Winters 2006). Given the embedded
community relationship to school that such statistics
Kristien Marquez-Zenkov is Associate Professor of Literacy and Teacher Education at Cleveland State University. He directs an urban and social justice-focused
teacher licensure program, and has written on urban teacher training, induction, and notions of teacher quality. He is currently collaborating with city youths
and their families to write a visually based history of their experiences with school.
140
K. Marquez-Zenkov
represent, the author chose not to focus this study’s
primary inquiry on the ‘visible curriculum’ of evidence
of how students and teachers are positioned during their
school activities. This would have been assuming that
these city youth and community members are actually
present in these school sites and available for the data of
their stances to be analyzed. Rather, the author (a
former city high school teacher and current urban
teacher educator) chose to concentrate this investigation
on students’ implicit learning about the rejection of these
formal education institutions. This study’s examination
of the visible curriculum of school began with the
foundational question of the role of school in these
students’ lives (McClung 2002). This everyday
curriculum is already a programme of endemic
community-wide rebuffs where each succeeding
generation of youth simultaneously sees and lives,
and learns and teaches about, the irrelevance of ‘school’.
Schools may be the only institution in the United States
to which it is assumed that every person will at one time
have a significant and constructive relationship:
compulsory schooling has existed in the United States
for better than 100 years and even home-schooling
introduces youth to formal processes of education
(Reese 2005). It is the differentiated quality of this
relationship and the grand assumptions about
schooling’s importance across this nation’s diversity that
suggest evidence of a troubling and willful ignorance of
the realities of urban students’ associations with this
institution. This research endeavours to understand the
reasons behind these diverging relationships, which are
perhaps best illustrated by an increasing disparity in
educational achievement amongst this nation’s various
demographics. While this ‘achievement gap’ is well
documented and researched, this article concentrates on
the cumulative ‘education debt’ in which such year-byyear disparities are grounded (Ladson-Billings 2006).
Without research into these relationships and this ‘debt’,
it is not inconceivable that urban schooling systems in
the United States will continue to groom an
undereducated underclass resembling a domestic Third
World populace both in terms of civic engagement and
economic well-being (Lubienski 2000; Bracey 2001; Hess
2002; Cornett and Gaudelli 2003; Franciosi 2004).
Of course, no individual’s relationship to school exists in
a vacuum. Educational sociologists have detailed the
complexity of these affiliations (Anyon 1997, 2005;
Lareau, 2003), revealing that the networks of people who
influence today’s urban youth are different than what
one might expect and that the ways in which these
generations of city dwellers impact each others’
perceptions of school are extremely complex (Orfield
2004). Very often products of multiple cycles of teen
pregnancy, urban youth are typically less than half of a
traditional generation’s length apart from their parents
(Fine 1990; Croninger and Lee 2001; Young 2003;
Greene and Winters 2006). These students and the
adults in their lives are virtually of the same generation:
imagine a new, almost nonsensical answer to the age-old
‘chicken and egg’ question. As a consequence, it has
become increasingly difficult to determine or challenge
the origins of our urban communities’ disengagement
from school (Dorn 1996; Alexander, Entwisle, and
Kabbani 2001; National Center for Education Statistics
2002). With this role intensification and obfuscation
(i.e. adolescents responsible for babies, grandparents
providing care for multiple generations of youth, and
not even middle-aged parents in charge of households
filled with four generations of family), parents’
rejections of school have become almost synonymous
with youths’ rebuffs of formal education, and will still be
developing when these young adults begin to share this
perception with their own children as they start to
dismiss school.
Because these generations of community members are
now interwoven and informing each new student
cohort’s rejection of school, the research on which this
article reports utilized a critical pedagogy framework
that attempted to explore, critique and challenge these
realities (Burbules and Berk 1999; McLaren 2000, 2003).
This study’s methods relied on the underpinning
assumption that school practices should address how to
construct institutional conditions in which the lived
experience of empowerment for the vast majority of
students is a defining feature (Giroux and McLaren
1994). As critical pedagogues, the ‘Through Students’
Eyes’ directors (one of whom is this article’s author)
attempted to help students to achieve ‘critical
consciousness’ and to challenge their seemingly ‘free’
choices to position themselves as schooling outsiders
(Shor 1992). This project and report are both attempts
at sharing students’ perspectives on schooling with an
eye towards transforming the oppressive nature of
current schooling practices.
LITERACY AND VISUALLY BASED RESEARCH
METHODS
Recent analyses of high school dropouts reveal how the
cross-generational nature of school disengagement has
promoted an exponential increase of both ‘unschooling’
stances and aliteracy (the choice by people who can read
and write not to do so) amongst urban community
Through city students’ eyes
members (National Center for Education Statistics 2002;
Alvermann 2004; Samuelson 2004). Scholars as diverse
as literacy theorists and education historians have
detailed how American economic, political and
education systems have pushed urban students towards
this schooling indifference (Alexander, Entwisle, and
Horsey 1997; O’Brien, Springs, and Stith 2001; Pallas
2002). No study of the state of American schools can
exclude a discussion of the role of literacy development
in city students’ lives and decisions to stay in or drop
out of school (Alvermann 2001). Current accounts
affirm that limited middle grades literacy achievement
(lowest amongst minority city youth) is a key predictor
of these students’ later academic frustration as well as a
primary indicator of these youths’ eventual
determinations to drop out of high school (Children’s
Defense Fund 2005). Contemporary studies have
provided particular insights into how schools’
curricular, pedagogical and assessment responses to
issues of multiplicity, and these diverse populations’ low
traditional literacy rates, intersect and lead to overall
school disengagement (Willis 1986; Kaufman, Kwon,
and Klein 2000; Education Trust Inc. 2003; Federation
for Community Planning 2003; Janisch and Johnson
2003; Kaufman, Alt, and Chapman 2004). These literacy
rates and current concepts of literacy played an
important role in the development of the methods used
in this study.
‘New literacy’ theorists have re-defined the concept of
‘literacy’ over the past two decades, broadening it to
include many ‘texts’ with which American urban
students (but not many urban schools) are proficient,
including visual, electronic and musical forms, and
community and cultural dialects and media (Au 1993;
Street 1995, 2003; Cope and Kalantzis 2000; Begoray
2002; Gee 2002). While few paths in the primary
economy and certainly no instances of standardized
curricula or assessments appreciate this reality, such
notions and examples do illustrate how city youth are
not illiterate but merely aliterate (New London Group
1996; Luke and Elkins 1998). They are choosing to ‘read’
numerous unsanctioned texts, even during school,
including hip-hop lyrics, text messages and constant
evolutions of youth vernacular (Alvermann and Hagood
2000; Gallego and Hollingsworth 2000; Gee 2000; Hull
and Schultz 2002; Newkirk 2002). Such insights into
urban adolescents’ literacies evoked the curricular and
research tools with which this study was conducted. In
addition to these concepts of literacy, the author’s use of
visual methods was also supported by critical pedagogy
tenets, which encourage the development of research
techniques, curricular practices, and new forms of
141
knowledge through an emphasis on breaking down
traditional disciplines (Kincheloe 2004).
The broad foundations of literacy described above
suggest that city students’ proficiency with visual texts
and, in particular, photographic images might provide
insights into youths’ relationships to school, their
competencies, and the foundations for curricula and
pedagogies that can promote their appreciation for
formal education and the texts upon which it relies (Kist
2002, 2005). Eminent educational thinkers – from
Dewey (1980) to Gallas (1991) and from Egan (1992) to
Eisner (1994) – have looked to a wide array of artistic
approaches for tools to achieve these most foundational
goals of public school engagement and achievement
(Willis and Schubert 2000). As well, picturing and
understanding city students’ perceptions of school
might assist in the development of new generations of
effective teachers who will eventually serve innumerable
urban students (Ladson-Billings 1998; Weiner 1999;
Lucas and Villegas 2003; Shakespear, Beardsley, and
Newton 2003). Given our urban communities’
disengagement from their educational institutions, city
youth and their family members are clearly in need of
such opportunities for input into the nature and
practices of school (Freire and Macedo 1987; Cavin
2000).
The findings of this study affirm that visually based
methods provide data that are typically not accessible via
traditional, language-focused techniques (Collier and
Collier 1986; Walker 1993; Becker 2001; Pole 2004;
Raggl and Schratz 2004). Such images and depictions
promote what Elliot Eisner has described as ‘epistemic
seeing’, or the process of gaining an awareness of the
larger world through the study of photographs of
particular individuals, groups and situations (Eisner
1991). Research using photographs as the primary data
have proven to be useful tools in helping students to
share their stories of learning, using their own voices
(Francis 1991; Karlsson 2001; Margolis 2004). As well,
what Schratz and Loffler-Anzbock call the ‘photo
evaluation’ technique has been utilized as a basis for
engaging teachers and students in the deconstruction of
classroom and school realities (Schratz and SteinerLoffler 1998; Orellana 1999; Macbeath, Meuret, and
Scratz 2000; Schratz and Loffler-Anzbock 2004). The
evidence of these previous photography-based studies
and extensive literacy research reveal the extent to which
urban students are insatiable, if not critical, consumers
and producers of visual texts and reluctant, if not
resistant, users of traditional language-focused forms. It
is not unreasonable to speculate that the visual evidence
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K. Marquez-Zenkov
FIGURE 2. ‘Some Day’. The picture of the wedding represents someone with a good education and a nice job, and everything is going right in their lives. It’s
a place where I would like to be some day in my life. It also represents happiness and joy – something that everyone wants to have some day. People also
need happiness to keep healthy. (Dashaun)
FIGURE 3. ‘A Chance to Succeed’. Some people are born with natural talent. It might be athletic or academic ability. School gives them a chance to succeed.
Combining athletics and school helps students who are not cut out for school. When athletes are given a certain standard, like a 2.0 grade point average or no
Fs, then they go above that standard. It’s not that all athletes are terrible students, but for the ones who have trouble in school, it kind of hangs over their
heads, and it motivates them to do well in school. If school was all about grades, attendance and work, then there would be no point. Athletics gives a kid
with a 2.0 GPA a chance to get out of poverty and into college. Students who achieve, whether academically or athletically, are role models. (Marvin)
Through city students’ eyes
143
of this study provides insights that cannot be garnered
through survey or interview methods.
youth participants, and finally described by students in
paragraph-length writings.
This project’s directors posited that through the use of
photographic tools they might help this generation of
city dwellers reveal what school means to them, and
perhaps assist other community members in responding
with discussions of school that would allow this
institution to matter in more significant ways to this
broader set of constituents (Prosser and Schwartz 1998;
Mitchell, Weber, and O’Reilly-Scanlon 2005). This
article reports on the results of the ‘Through Students’
Eyes’ (TSE) project begun in 2004 with approximately
30 high school and middle school students from this
major Midwestern centre’s most ethnically, racially,
linguistically and economically diverse neighbourhoods.
The community’s primary high school serves a student
population that speaks better than two dozen languages,
represents almost 200 ethnicities, and houses all of the
district’s ‘English as a Second Language’ programmes.
Ninth graders at this city high school average below a
fifth-grade reading level, and the dropout rate soars as
high as 67% amongst Latina and Latino youths, the
school’s largest demographic group.
Relying on grounded theory analysis methods, each of
the three project directors then separately content
analyzed these nearly 100 photographs and writings for
prevalent and outlying visual and descriptive topics and
themes (Ball and Smith 1992; Silverman 1993; Walker
1993; Creswell 1998; Glaser 1998). While project
participants were involved in the initial selection of these
images and crafted the accompanying reflections with
assistance from the project directors, students were not
involved in this stage of analysis. These emergent topics
and themes (and the photographs and writings related
to them) were then re-considered by the directors
through the lens of the project’s questions – schools’
purposes, impediments and supports – and potential
implications for urban teachers’ practices. It should be
noted that students’ images and writings often provide
different, and occasionally even contradictory, insights;
the author viewed such disparate themes as evidence of
the complexity and potential of visually based methods
and data. In this report, then, findings include
illustrations of the most commonly appearing topics and
themes. Both visual and descriptive data are used to
illustrate these conclusions.
Supported by several local foundation grants, the TSE
project provided each participant with a 35mm ‘point
and shoot’ camera and a supply of film. Following
instruction in the basics of camera operation and an
initial ‘photo walk’ into the school’s neighbourhood to
model the ‘photo evaluation’ process, students took
pictures for nearly a year (an average of eight rolls or 200
images per person) in response to the three project
questions:
1) What are the purposes of school?
2) What helps you to succeed in school?
3) What gets in the way of your school success?
Students submitted their film and met every two weeks
at a local photography gallery to view, discuss, select and
write about their photographs. At these bi-weekly
sessions, pictures were chosen by the students, by the
project directors, and with the assistance of volunteer
professional photographers. Pictures were identified on
the basis of students’ and adults’ perceptions of the
relevance of these photographs to the project questions,
as well as assessments of the photographs’ quality and
participants’ interests in the images. From the more than
3000 images that students shot over the project year,
approximately 100 photographs were eventually selected
as the best illustrations of students’ responses to the
project’s guiding questions, then discussed in 1:1 and
small group sessions with the project directors and other
PURPOSES OF SCHOOL
In response to the first question of students’ perceptions
of the purposes of school, several distinct themes
emerged. As these themes reveal, participants
interpreted this question both as ‘What should be the
purposes of school?’ and ‘What are the purposes of
school, as you are now experiencing it?’ Urban students
believe that schools should enable them to live what they
consider a ‘good’ life: as a result of school, they want to
be successful, happy, healthy, and in meaningful
relationships. Dashaun’s photograph and writing
illustrate this idea (Figure 2).
As revealed in these images and texts, city youth also
think that school should both prepare them for and help
them attain interesting, consequential employment.
Because they have seen plenty of tedium in their family
members’ occupations, they do not want to be bored in
their adult lives and they want to engage in jobs that are
meaningful to them personally and to our larger world.
Marita’s image of several women lounging, eating and
smoking in an assembly plant breakroom was
accompanied by her reflection:
‘Avoiding Factory Work’: I don’t want to work
in a factory. I work here with my friend only
144
K. Marquez-Zenkov
FIGURE 4. ‘Someone Dies’. Every time someone dies, there’s a shrine, usually with Hispanics.
The people I see on the shrines are often young. It just makes me want to leave the area I live
in. And the reason for their death at a young age is the lack of education. They drop out of
school and get involved with drugs and it leads to their demise. (Edward)
when they need help. It is a very boring job. I
can’t see myself working here in the future.
Watching these people get up every morning to
go to work and come back from work so tired
motivates me to get up every morning to go to
school.
Students’ photographs and writings also depicted that
they believe that school should be a place where they are
honoured for who they are and what they know, rather
than dismissed or pigeonholed on the basis of their
previous academic records, races, classes, abilities and
genders. They want their interests to be appreciated by
teachers and even used to make their classes relevant to
them. Marvin’s image and description exemplified this
theme (Figure 3).
Numerous pictures and writings illustrated that students
supposed that city schools should be the great equalizer
in society and should give every youth a fair chance to
explore any option. In their eyes, schools should open
students up to alternatives, rather than mandate that
they choose a particular option, or, worse, give students
little sense of the specific choices that they believe should
be available to everyone. Coupled with an image of a
Through city students’ eyes
145
FIGURE 5. ‘The Alley Behind My House’. This little girl lives two doors down from my house. Drug dealers live in the neighbourhood, and the alley is where
they sell drugs. One time my brother was riding his bike there, and he saw prostitution going on. People running from the police always go through there. It’s
dangerous for her to be playing there. When I was that age, there used to be volunteers who would play games with us in the park. That programme helped
keep us out of trouble. It’s not there anymore. (Edward)
Latino adolescent holding a bookbag and sitting on a
bicycle on a neighbourhood sidewalk, Tabitha’s
reflection spoke to this analysis theme:
‘There Are Possibilities’: This young man is an
artist in the community. He is living proof that
not everything is bad in our society. He is an
inspiration, not only to me, but to the younger
kids. He shows us that there are possibilities
out there.
Edward’s photograph and description (Figure 4)
suggested how city youth recognize that school is both a
mechanism to attain success in their present and future
lives, as well as the primary institutional support for
ensuring that they stay open to any potential
constructive pursuit through which they might attain
this success.
IMPEDIMENTS TO SCHOOL SUCCESS
In addressing the second of the project questions,
students’ photographs and reflections revealed a
similarly broad range of theses. Students are painfully
aware that the ubiquitous violence in their communities
and lives impedes their abilities to get to, to concentrate
on, and to value school. Adam’s picture of a young
African American boy attempting a gang sign that’s
being modelled by a partially obscured adult family
member was accompanied by his explanation:
‘Family Signs’: This is a picture of my cousin,
D’Angelo. He’s 11 years old and he’s in the
fourth grade. He is throwing up the ‘KingKennedy’ sign because he represents KingKennedy. People join gangs because they want
to get back at other people who jumped their
friends. His mother was born at King-Kennedy.
My mother was born at King-Kennedy, too. My
little brother goes to school right near the KingKennedy projects. I don’t want to join a gang
because when gangs start fighting and then you
have to represent your ’hood, then people start
shooting, and then you’ll feel stupid, and then
you’ll get shot, and you’ll think, ‘I shouldn’t
have joined that gang.’
As Edward’s image and reflection reveal (Figure 5), these
youth recognize the distractions involved in the appeal,
pressure, and necessity of trying to make money, via
both the primary economy (mostly franchise service jobs
or the occasional family-owned business) and the street.
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K. Marquez-Zenkov
Via both photographs and texts, these urban students
consistently identified family connections (what many
of us would consider our primary set of relationships) as
a void into which their needs for guidance, financial and
emotional support, and basic, constructive social
interactions are drawn. While they appreciate the
supportive social networks that groups of friends and
even gangs provide – frequently without an option to
choose otherwise – they see that these associations often
come with a price. They view themselves and their peers
as caught in isolation, particularly at key moments of
their lives (e.g. the birth of a child) when much of the
rest of the world teaches them that they should have a
partner in these times. As evidenced by Tabitha’s picture
of a young Latina mother resting in a hospital bed with
her newborn son, these young adults may not yet know
how to forge such life collaborations, but they can
identify the necessity and value of such relationships.
She explained the significance of this image in the
following paragraph:
‘Not What It Appears to Be’: Although the
young lady in the picture appears to be happy,
in reality she is not. What is supposed to be the
happiest day of her life, the day her son was
born, is probably the worst. Her mother, her
father, and even the father of her baby were not
there for the birth. She has no one. She’s only
19 and now has two children and can barely
take care of herself. If you don’t have anybody
to help you and you have to raise two children,
then it will be difficult to accomplish your
goals. That’s what gets in the way of education.
Their photographs and accompanying written
depictions illustrated how these city students often seek
to follow the models of success with which they are
distantly familiar (e.g. sports stars and business leaders),
refusing to accept that these paths of accomplishment
are unlikely or inaccessible. Absent these models in their
immediate families, they look to their everyday
contemporaries and associates, who are themselves
searching for and too often incapable of providing the
positive mentors they both desire. In these peers and
parents, family and friends, they see both the attraction
and the danger of short-term opportunities (for
example, working more, on the street or the local outlet
FIGURE 6. ‘Having Fun’. Teens like to have fun with other teens and it is healthy to get out to enjoy yourself for just those couple hours. It helps you relieve
stress. First thing Monday morning, I wake up at 5 o’clock and get my sister up and ready for school, get her down to the rapid station by 6:00 and then I come
back and make sure that my younger brother and another sister get up and dress by 6:45. My younger brother and I catch our bus and we get to school about
7:30. I call my sisters’ schools and make sure they made it there safely before I go to class…. During athletic seasons, I go to practice after school, then to work
at 5:30. Then, I head home at 10:00 and get there about 11:00. Before going to bed at midnight, I help my mom with her daycare business and clean around
the house. (Marvin)
Through city students’ eyes
of a discount department store) to earn a bit more cash,
focusing on videogames, sports, or relationships, to the
exclusion of homework or simply showing up for
school. But they also can distinguish the frequently
murky long-term realities in which such choices result.
Again, they are anxious for guides who can show them
how to make healthier, more constructive long-term
decisions.
These students’ visual and descriptive data divulge how
perhaps the simplest but most compelling of the
impediments to their school success are the tremendous
quantity and range of activities, responsibilities, and
options they confront, even on a daily basis. The sheer
number of duties, people, stimuli, and choices youth
encounter – work, family, love, friendships, sports –
reveals how many of them simply do not have much
mental, physical or emotional space to care about or
engage with school in a constructive way. Or, as the
author has witnessed in his work in city schools, to
participate in a productive way in anything greater than
fits and starts. Marvin’s photograph of a teenage couple
at a school dance was complemented by his reflection
(Figure 6).
147
With so many responsibilities, too often these city youth
simply cannot attend or attend to school for more than a
couple of days per week. They may be present, but they
are not there. While they are already too engaged with
the rest of their lives to be able to pay attention to school
in the way they might hope, they recognize that they
need more teachers and other adults who can provide
them with affirmative choices. While their lives are
already beyond full, they would like to have safer
options to fill their days.
SUPPORTS FOR SCHOOL SUCCESS
In their photographs and texts, many of this project’s
participants identified the complicated and even
paradoxical nature of the aids and obstructions to their
school accomplishments. Many of the impediments to
their school success can also serve as supports for this
achievement. This duality should be interpreted as a
suggestion not that youth and their families are
primarily responsible for counteracting these structures,
but that urban students can be motivated by factors in
their lives that an outside observer might consider
overwhelming. While they are conscious of the negative
FIGURE 7. ‘Teachers Who Trust You’. This is Juan. He breaks with friends of mine, as much as a couple of times a week in the summer. I go hang out with
them sometimes. My friend Antonio, who goes to our school, breaks with them. He’s very good and he’s very into it. He is also in drama club at school. The
drama teacher lets him do his breakdancing and plan all the dancing in school plays, even in the Christmas Carol play. Some teachers may not trust you
enough to do that. That’s what keeps guys like him in school. (Kevin)
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K. Marquez-Zenkov
consequences of choices made by their family members
and peers, this awareness can support them in making
different, more beneficial decisions. Edward explained
his photograph of his young niece in the following way:
‘My Niece’: This is a picture of my niece who is
a year old and is living with me. Her father is
incarcerated so she doesn’t have a father. She
motivates me every day to do anything I do
because I don’t want her to grow up like her
father did. I love her and I’d do whatever it
takes to take care of her.
Perhaps the primary support for school success that
participants in this study identified was, in fact, their
teachers. They appreciated those teachers who engaged
with them as people, who actively and explicitly cared
about them as something more than one of the likely
hundred-plus youth they encountered in a day. They
yearn to have longer term relationships with teachers
and to be given opportunities to prove themselves as
capable young adults, who are trusted to make positive
choices and serve as models for their peers. Our students
repeatedly revealed that the relationships teachers form
with them can be the most significant factor in their
school success. Kevin articulated the impact of these
relationships in his photograph and text (Figure 7).
While images and writings from numerous students
documented the importance of these relationships,
others illustrated how such sustained and more ‘real
world’ connections with teachers are not enough to
make school achievement and engagement a new norm
for these youth. They also crave authentic activities with
explicit relevance and with meaning for settings beyond
the school walls. They believe that they are – or are
capable of being – responsible young adults and they
want to be honoured in such roles by classroom pursuits
that allow them to practice these positions. By extension,
they want teachers to provide formal opportunities for
them to serve as role models for younger students; not
only is this a genuine function for adolescents, but it’s a
responsibility that they take on often in their families
and communities and one for which they would like
recognition and support in school.
The evidence of this study discloses the extent to which
participants appreciated the teachers and other adults in
their lives who spoke to them and with them about the
value of school. While many of us in our teaching roles
might not feel as if the message is getting through when
we profess the importance of education, our youth are
listening. Feeling listened to was, in fact, another key
element in these students’ school success. Their lives are
filled with realities with which many of us were not
familiar as high school students, and they need caring
adults who will listen to them, without judgment, when
they are willing to share what they are thinking,
planning, doing, believing, and failing to understand.
Melinda’s photograph of her grandmother, who owns
the lunch counter where Melinda worked one of her
three part-time jobs, was complemented by text
(Figure 8).
Finally, the visual and text data of this project illustrate
that these students were longing for some streamlining
in their lives: they recognized that one thing that
sustains their school success is the ability to engage in
both constructive recreational activities and in nothing at
all. They are aware of the extent to which their lives – in
and out of school – are filled with activities, pressures,
responsibilities, and expectations, and they simply want
more space to make sense of this ‘clutter’ and more time
to appreciate what they sense really matters. Tabitha’s
picture of her softball team celebrating a win at a local
pizza shop illustrated this longing and was explained in
the following paragraph:
‘It’s About Passion’: Team sports help you
succeed and to accomplish your goals. If I
didn’t have softball, there would be something
missing. Every day before I go to school, even
out of season, I am thinking about softball. I
am thinking about plays, about my coach, and
about how to help another player when they are
having a bad day. Softball is such a big part of
my life and if I didn’t have it, every day at
school would be gray. Some of my teammates
might even drop out of school without it.
Softball is about passion; it gives you drive and
the desire to succeed. You rely on one another
for support. If you don’t have those things in
school, then you will not succeed.
IMPLICATIONS FOR CITY TEACHERS AND
CURRICULA
The ‘Through Students’ Eyes’ project did not begin as
one meant to inform the author’s work as a city teacher
educator who remains engaged with urban schools. It
started as a straightforward inquiry into the points of
view of a generation of urban youth for whom school
(this institution, its classes and its curricula) appear to
hold little value. These students, though, have revealed
much about what they believe about the general
pedagogical practices that are the central intrigues of the
author’s life. Their insights affirm what many other
researchers and educators have been trying to teach us.
Through city students’ eyes
That city teachers might engage our students’ existing
literacies and use texts with which they are proficient as
bridges to traditional texts and to a stronger, more
constructive relationship to school itself. Many examples
of such curricular links exist, in the work of literacy
educators including Elizabeth Moje (2000), Jabari
Mahiri (2004), Ernest Morrell and Jeff Duncan-Andrade
(2004) and William Kist (2005).
Yet, the evidence of this article suggests that such links
should be incorporated into the work of all city teachers,
rather than just English teachers or those who are
operating within a ‘new literacy’ framework. All high
school classes might incorporate the no longer radical
practice of utilizing ‘multiliteracies’ as foundations for
curricula and for revealing the relevance of school and
its texts. These classes might look to social activities,
community networks and peer mentoring as core
elements of every lesson. As substantiated by students’
responses to this project’s guiding questions, a vast
number of ‘literacies’ (knowledge and capacities that
youth possess that are often unrecognized and
unappreciated by teachers’ strategies, curricula, and
assessments) are embedded in these young adults’
149
photographs and frequently identified in their writings.
While many of these will not be foreign to this article’s
readers, students’ awareness of these suggests that they
should play a more significant role in city teachers’
pedagogical practices. Urban youth are proficient with
social networks, relationships, cultures, differences and
biases. They know about families and the roles within
them, about friends and neighbourhoods and gangs.
They are literate in formal groups such as teams and
more fluid associations such as communities. These
considerable literacies suggest that one of the primary
impediments to urban students’ success is our schools’
insistence that life and learning must take place within
the four walls of our school buildings. If we cannot bring
these literacies into our classrooms, then perhaps
schools and teachers will need to venture out to the
homes of these aptitudes.
City students know about choices, pressures and
opportunities, particularly when it comes to the in- and
out-of school social networks in which they engage, and
to the pursuits to which they have access. These city
students appreciate the nuances of abilities, disabilities,
talents and effort. They are literate in discipline and
FIGURE 8. ‘The Glue in My Life’. Without my grandma I would not be a senior in high school. I would not be at school every day trying to complete all of my
assignments. I wouldn’t be filing for financial aid or even scouting for colleges. My grandma is the glue in my life. If it was not for her I wouldn’t be as together
as I am. I would just be another teenager who is going nowhere. She has pushed me to succeed in life. She tells me that I should just suck it up and go on
even if sometimes I think I can’t and I will come out on top. She is the best support system you could ever have. (Melinda)
150
K. Marquez-Zenkov
barriers, and they know about goals and expectations.
Finally, they are proficient with the universal themes of
beauty, meaning, death, inspiration and defiance. They
are silent, hopeful, frustrated, resilient, passionate,
observant and candid. They long to be known, even
when their school and out-of-school experiences have
suggested to them that being so is neither safe nor
supported.
City students understand and ‘speak’ numerous
languages, and they are capable of – and live and
sometimes die by – frequently switching ‘codes’. They
know their roles, and others’ roles, and they know – if
they do not always appreciate – many sets of rules. They
are literate in modeling and mentoring, in serving as and
being served by adults, teachers, peers and even younger
siblings as guides. They grasp the constructive,
innocuous and destructive qualities their mentors
present to them. Urban youths’ proficiency with these
languages and models suggest that our schools and
communities are extraordinarily successful at training
students to live within the strict limits we present them;
they have learned not to expect to be challenged in our
classrooms and they have been conditioned to mimic
behaviours that do not lead to school success. It is
imperative that schools allow them to live (if only during
school hours) with adults who defy these limited
expectations; these behaviours are observable and
assessable and our training and assessments of city
teachers should incorporate such dispositions and
performances. Current narrow evaluations of teachers
promoted by the ‘No Child Left Behind’ legislation
might be expanded to include this conduct and these
qualities.
In addition to considering and incorporating these
literacies into their teaching practices, urban teachers’
pedagogies might include more active mentoring and
formal recognition by the greatest range of adults in
students’ lives. Even adults who have not have
experienced school or literacy success in their own
formal education can play such supportive, counseling
roles with city youth. Teachers might compromise some
academic content in order to provide richer, more ‘real
world’ contexts for students’ learning, in the shape of
regular involvement with these mentors.
Urban adolescents need to hear these statements of the
value of education across their school, home and
community lives. Even more importantly, they need to
be asked to articulate this value for themselves and asked
for input into how to enact this value in their classes and
how to make this value more evident. Rather than
traditional pedagogical methods that rely on teachers’
evaluations of students’ learning, teachers’ practices
might incorporate regular (even class-by-class) student
self-assessments and descriptions of the value of the
academic content they are encountering. Again, such a
technique would reduce teachers’ abilities to concentrate
on subject matter, but would ensure that students were
perceiving the value of the content they were addressing.
Given the central importance of literacy skills in
students’ persistence in school and as predictors of their
academic success, such expressions (which involve core
literacy competencies such as writing, speaking and
listening) have tremendous value.
Finally, as described above, the standards by which
urban teachers are judged and the qualities that they are
expected to possess might include notions of flexibility
and resistance, a greater dependence on our abilities to
build professional and personal relationships with our
students, and a proficiency with what the author has
come to call ‘daily forgiveness’ and ‘blind faith’: the
capacity for returning to our young adults and our
schools day after day, sometimes even minute by
minute, with an unflagging hope for these youth and
their abilities to achieve. In addition to – or even rather
than – existing teacher quality standards and
assessments promoted by federal policy or organizations
like the National Council for the Accreditation of
Teacher Education (NCATE), teacher training
programmes and formal evaluations should consider the
criteria these students have suggested.
CONCLUSION
As a result of this study, the author hoped to examine
the visible curriculum of schools’ purposes in a way that
would provide roles for urban students in the
development of these objectives and ideals. By supplying
this project’s participants and its audiences with a means
to see and interrogate the goals of city schools, the
project directors anticipated that both the development
and the content of these goals would become more
germane to these city students’ lives and their
communities. As well, they hoped that the publication
and exhibitions of this project’s photographs might
result in a deeper understanding by a more expansive
range of schools’ constituents about the relevance of
school. While the focus of this project was one group of
city high school students, the larger audience of this
project might help to make schools’ core purposes ones
that are pertinent to the curricula and teaching practices
of classrooms in their communities. While many of the
findings of this study are consistent with those of other
Through city students’ eyes
researchers using traditional language-focused research
methods, the insights provided by this study suggest a
complexity in these issues, a unique set of methods for
exploring these themes, and illustrative evidence that
extends the conversation about city students’
relationships to school.
In city schools in the United States, where far too many
students fail to engage with their academic
opportunities, educators might consider any means
through which they can increase our students’
participation in traditional educational activities. City
teachers and community members faced with endemic
academic disengagement cannot hope to challenge
students’ learned detachment with a saviour mentality
or ‘lesson of the year’ performances. And they cannot
begin to engage students with school until teachers see
and have a legitimate understanding of the conditions of
these students’ lives, how these relate to formal
education, and students’ perspectives on school and its
purposes.
This research has revealed the extent to which this
project’s hopes for engaging city youth with school are,
151
in fact, generational concerns, in terms of both time and
responsibility. City youths’ perceptions of the
irrelevance of school did not develop and will not evolve
in the schooling lifespan of a single cohort of students.
This project makes explicit that every teacher’s challenge
is to engage even a single generation of students so that
one day more youth and their communities will be able
to appreciate school and recognize their success in it. As
well, this ideal of school engagement and achievement
will only emerge when these students’ home and school
interactions, and all of the adults who facilitate them,
consistently communicate to these youth that school
actually matters.
In closing, the author cannot report that the ‘Through
Students’ Project’ had a significant and positive impact
on the school engagement and achievement of the
approximately thirty students involved in it. Since the
summer in which most were expected to graduate, it’s
been difficult to keep track of these youths’ choices and
paths. As well, it would be unreasonable to suggest that
this one activity could counter relationships to school
these youth had developed across even their brief
lifetimes. A bit of hope can be found in Von and the
FIGURE 9. ‘Another Great Teacher’. When I look at this picture I see two different lives: I see a happy security guard, Kelly, and I see Mrs. Williams, a teacher
who looks unhappy to be there. For people who know Mrs. Williams, this is not the teacher we’ve seen over the years at our school. She’s usually happy all the
time. Students who have graduated still come back to get advice from her. I don’t know if she’s unhappy because of the recent layoffs or the sudden change
in the school with the new staff. It would be a shame to see a good teacher like Mrs. Williams all of a sudden quit. I feel this can affect students because that’ll
be another great teacher we would have lost along with her support, honesty and friendship. (Von)
152
K. Marquez-Zenkov
realities that he introduced at the beginning of this
report. Von did not earn a high school diploma at the
end of what was his senior year. The vagaries of course
credits, the impact of a reduction in school counselors,
and the appeal of a third-shift job and an apartment
with his older girlfriend meant that he started the
summer unsure of how to finish the requirements for a
diploma; he resorted, as he had described earlier, to
‘selling’ or small-time drug dealing. It took six months,
but he finally earned his General Equivalency Diploma
(GED) and started taking classes at the downtown
campus of the county community college. More
importantly, it took the continued investment of his
mother and the more than occasional communication
with at least one of the ‘Through Students’ Eyes’ project
directors for him to take the small steps towards
finishing one school and starting another, towards
working in one of those high-rise buildings across the
valley. Through this project, we (the project’s directors)
listened to him and eventually he listened to us; through
pictures, words, and actions (Figure 9).
NOTE
[1] All names used in this essay are pseudonyms.
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