Reflection On Race, Class And Imagining The Urban

On Thursday June 22nd 2017, I had the opportunity to walk through Crown Heights Brooklyn with a group of three New York City Teaching Fellows. The purpose of our visit was to study the communinty and gather background information and identify community resources. As a group we visited two schools in the community, Clara Barton High School and Elijah Stroud Middle School, which are all less thean a half a mile of each other. In preperation for our walk we read the article Race, Class and Imagining The Urban by Zeus Leonardo and Margeret Hunter. In the article the authors did a study on the urban in which it it describes it as a constant process of modernization, and how it may be an outlet for some, but for others who live in the urban setting, is viewed as innescapable poverty for others. The implications of the urban, as it relates to education, community, student, and teachers is that teachers and school staff that may not live in the community are outsiders. This is why it is important to foster healthy relationships between teachers, students, families, and communities. Teachers, faculty, and staff must be empathetic to conditions of poverty that exist within the community in which we become apart of.

I saw a process of gentrification bringing about a change to the community as described in Imagining The Urban. Homes and properties are being forclosed upon, rents increasing and new groups of people moving into the community in which we visited. The control of of real estate by the priveledged and the wealthy and not empathetic to the displacement of families is a form of opression. The site of Starbucks in a community where most cant afoord a cup of coffe they serve is a sign of a changing dynamic in which many hard working families become