Chapter 17: In Defense of a Place Called School: Aesthetics-as-Praxis in Times of Crisis

Educating in, with, and through the COVID-19 pandemic provokes a scholarly urgency towards a creative “research as praxis” (Lather, 1986/2004); research for a more just social order in a time of profound suffering and increasing inequalities. This paper explores the findings and analysis from a university project called (Re)Imagining Schools: Voices from the University Students. Using student-centered arts-based methodologies, university students created reimagined physical designs for public schools, material resources, and pedagogical considerations during (and beyond) the COVID-19 crisis. The process and product of this project interweave critical aesthetics (Carey, 1998), and affective theorizing (Zembylas, 2014), revealing, “difficult knowledge as an intersection of language, desire, power, bodies, social structure, materiality, and trauma” (p. 390). The methodology supports a social justice-oriented inquiry that is relational, emergent, (and) transformative (McDermott, 2001). Students were able to consider public schools as a form of public engagement during a moment of dualities: of increasing racial and economic disparities versus a time of radical social and technological innovations. This chapter invokes critical discussion of school design as “the third teacher” (Wicklund, et al., 2010) for justice and equity in education.