See School is a National Award Winning Field School
On seeing the city 

To guard ourselves from bitterness, we need the vision to see in this generation’s ordeals the opportunity to transfigure both ourselves and American society. Our present suffering and our nonviolent struggle to be free may well offer to Western civilization the kind of spiritual dynamic so desperately needed for survival.... We must accept finite disappointment but we must never lose infinite hope. Only in this way shall we live without the fatigue of bitterness and the drain of resentment. This was the secret of the survival of our slave foreparents.
                                                                                                                     Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

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The Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures field school is a unique curricular offering at the University of Wisconsin's Department of Architecture. It is a multi disciplinary setting where students, faculty, scholars and community members explore ways to see and interpret the city by engaging multiple urban stakeholders in storytelling, ecological conservation, heritage preservation and civic engagement.  From Grace Lee Boggs we learnt that "We are the leaders we've been looking for" and our job at the BLC field school is to empower such leaders. At the BLC field school we are committed to seeing our world using the following four frames. 

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caring

As our name suggests, BLC scholars explore the intimate relationships between buildings, landscapes and culture. We feel that such a study is an imperative for emerging students, scholars and citizens of the 21st Century. Our world is diverse and it is changing at a very rapid pace. This incessant transformation of culture, environment, economy and people necessitates new ways of understanding our world.  At the fieldschool we call that method "Spatial Ethnography" (Sen, 2014)—a strategy that merges an analysis of place as material culture with a thick description of human behavior and interactions. Our objective is to explore the reflexive and multi scalar relationship between people, culture and settings. It is an improvised interpretive method of restless storytelling that combines analysis of artifacts with ethnographic and observational accounts of how people use and give meaning to these artifacts. 

conscience

The politics of memory is central to our investigation of community heritage and history. The concept of conscience refers to the ethical dimension of historiography and community engagement. In her groundbreaking work on the Power of Place, Dolores Hayden (1995) writes "In American history, some of the most important themes about the political economy include the abuse of government to support private profit making, the exploitation of labor, and the exclusion of women and people of color from basic civil rights. Exploring these issues in terms of landscape history means framing questions of power around the politics of land use."

The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience website adds, "The need to remember often competes with the equally strong pressure to forget. Even with the best of intentions ... erasing the past can prevent new generations from learning critical lessons while forever compromising opportunities to build a peaceful future." At the BLC field school we approach storytelling of local places as an ethical and political act. For us, understanding the politics of storytelling is central to our goal of understanding the world around us. 

culture

Our community collaborators have taught us that historic preservation, ecological stewardship, community based art practice, and storytelling have one principle in common. They are all about the "ethics of caring" (Gilligan, 1982). The extent of stewardship is proportionate to access to social power. For many, home, neighborhood, environment, and even the world come up as objects of caring. We also know people who can barely care for their own body, or keep oneself healthy and happy. This realization has framed our pedagogy and future plans. Over the next five years we hope to engage five communities along North Avenue with the same overarching questions - what do you care for, how do you care for it, and why do you do so? We are interested in knowing how “local knowledge” be incorporated into the ways we practice historic preservation and ecological conservation?

connections

Hannah Arendt (1958), speaking of the public realm reminds us that “though the common world is the common meeting ground of all, those who are present have different locations in it, and the location of one can no more coincide with the location of another… Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position.”

Communication between students and community residents is an essential element of our project. In addition to building trust and long-lasting friendships, field school interactions are designed to engage multiple forms of knowledge that otherwise remain disconnected—disciplinary expert knowledge, specialized local knowledge, contextual knowledge, and critical social consciousness. While the students learn from community residents the vice versa is also true – promising a respectful exchange.  We continue to explore storytelling well after the completion of the field school. Stories spawn new stories, creating possibilities of communication and dialog across various stakeholders. 

Buy 2012 and 2013 Field School Monographs

Wendel White is the Distinguished Professor of Art at Stockton University in his life-long state of New Jersey. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and multiple New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships. 

From www.thephotoshow.org

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