Professor Ah-Young Song & Yvonne Hunter ’21, Education Department

This summer, Professor Song and I built two courses for an American school in Kuwait, focusing on spatial justice, community engagement, and developing critical literacy skills to be used for a future research project with international youth. These courses were designed to to support the academic and personal development of the students to prepare them for college or post-secondary life in the USA. 

For our first curriculum, I researched five topics: public and private space, gendered space, architecture, digital space, and community care. Each topic became the guiding theme for each day of the program, tying together class activities ranging from reimagining the social rules of local sites to pinpointing possible accessibility improvements, and examining how the digital world leaks into reality. The spatial justice course culminates in a multimodal project, in which students report on a current issue in their community through a critical spatial lens.

Our second curriculum is designed to build upon the understandings constructed in the first year, and is centered around the practice of world-building. Each day focuses on a particular field—medicine, advertising, urban planning, journalism, and technology—and analyzes it from the creator and consumer perspective. Students are challenged to reimagine this field in their own fictitious world, which becomes progressively more developed throughout the program. The concluding project presents their world and the political and social forces at play within it.

 I also reviewed articles from Professor Song’s dissertation on a Brooklyn out-of-school literacy program, providing comments to prepare future manuscripts for journal submissions. I compiled supplementary articles relevant to each chapter from prominent education journals such as Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy and Review of Research in Education.

A slide from our Architecture lesson

A slide from our Gendered Spaces lesson

First half of the Spatial Justice curriculum