Welcome to our website Race, Space, and Urban Schools: School Curriculum! We hope you find the information we have collected here to be interesting and helpful in understanding the ranging topic that is school curriculum. Throughout this website you will find opinion pieces written by each contributor as well as visual data representations concerning school curriculum within New York City’s high schools. We have asked and explored the question of “How school curriculum on a city, school, and classroom level influenced and determined by notions of race? How are educators to address the racial inequities of their classrooms and communities through curriculum? How are conceptions of race conflated with how students are expected to be educated?”
School curriculum is a broad topic. However, every aspect of a curriculum, from who creates it to who teaches it, are extremely connected. Although it may not seem obvious that social-emotional learning is related to arts education and that these are related to culturally responsive curriculum, this is not true. Students do not forget what they have learned in one class when they enter another. Students experience connections and interactions with peers, teachers, and administrators that shape their learning and growing process. Through this website, we hope to show this as well as emphasize the importance of creating curriculum that respect students as whole, multi-faceted beings.
In this website we focus on three specific aspects of school curriculum: social-emotional learning, arts education, and culturally responsive curriculum. Social-emotional learning is a curriculum that works to teach students skills for understanding emotions and maintaining healthy interpersonal relationships. Arts education involves the teaching of visual, musical, and theatre arts. Culturally Responsive curriculum uses the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, student contexts, and performance styles of ethnically, racially, and gender diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective.
We are three Barnard College students in the Urban Studies class Race, Space, and Urban Schools. Barnard College is located in New York, New York and is one of Columbia University’s undergraduate schools. Topics, such as school curriculum, are grounded in and affect the lived reality of actual people. The students and schools discussed are not a far off or imaginary idea, but rather people and places that exist, live, and are not unconnected to where we are located within our college.