Art-centered studies at Balboa City School are programs which link art project with curriculum and are designed to keep students fully and happily engaged in meaningful and deeply contextual activities. We begin by asking students to look at images and to make art related to the subject at hand. Both of these activities put students in a receptive mind and mood for learning. When we help students find their right mind and mood, learning follows a predictable course: they absorb information, draw conclusions, and discover interrelationships. The end-goal, and the most satisfying part of a good learning experience, is building connected knowledge.
In real life, Shantytowns, also called squatter communities, are a collection of self-constructed shacks built on marginal land, which has been seized and occupied illegally. Residents put shanties together with salvaged materials such as pieces of plywood, corrugated metal, and sheets of plastic. People live in shantytowns because they cannot afford the housing costs within cities. Some shantytowns have populations approaching that of a city. However, for people who live in slums, the kinds of government services that we take for granted such as public schools, health care, trash collection, law enforcement, road maintenance, fire departments, and social services are rare or non-existent.
Human settlements threaten family and social life, peace, security, community health, and the environment. Where people cannot find employment, or where they are grossly underpaid, a sense of hopelessness and futility prevails. Extreme inequality and idleness brings about anti-social behavior and in some places shantytowns become breeding grounds for political and social unrest. They are especially unsafe environments for women and children.
As a way to demonstrate the fate of these marginalized people, we asked our students to pretend that they were a group of migrants who left their rural homes because of war and famine. Our group migrated to an imaginary third world city in search of a reliable food source, employment, and government services such as schools, water and electricity. Once there, they found the streets crowded with displaced people who were also unemployed or barely making a living wage.
The Shantytowns art project involved four upper division English class students who collectively created twenty miniature shanties: a complete shantytown. Assigned reading included articles about shantytowns and excerpts from David Parker’s Stolen Dream (stories about working children). The finished product, a complex labyrinth and a wonder to behold, was installed on an outside patio wall and formally presented to the student body.
Each student constructed his or her own shanty entirely from found objects. Working from a true-to-life scenario, students were asked to think about what is, and what is not, doable when resources are limited or non-existent. Armed with information about shantytowns and a purpose, they also took on the subject as a set of interrelationships: human settlements (slums) and human migration, conditions of poverty, geo-politics, environmental consequences, government policies, public health and safety, resource management, and ethical responses.
In the eight days that it took students to create a shantytown, there was not a moment of discord. Children who work together for a common goal become connected and interdependent, which seems to give them a deep sense of being “one” with their work and with their community.