Industrias Relacionadas y Servicios de Apoyo:

... marginalization is primarily the product of class logic, in part redoubled by ethnonational origin and in part attenuated by state action. (Wacquant, 2008, 5)

The urbanization of suburbia and its political marginalization is a worldwide phenomenon. While working on this chapter, our attention was drawn to Montrealers’ attempts to make sense of the youth-lead riots that shook the north end of that city in 2008. Reminiscent of the uprisings that rocked Paris in 2005—suburban rioting that saw 10,000 cars set ablaze and 3,000 people (mostly young men and mostly sons of immigrants) arrested—the Montreal riots of 2008 caused Montrealers to watch in horror as cars were torched, Molotov cocktails were thrown, and guns were fired, and they asked themselves, “Can this really be happening here?” In the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), there are increasing

demands for tough new measures to control handguns in response to summer shootings that see dozens of people (mostly young men and mostly sons of immigrants) shot dead. As in 2005 (known locally as the “Summer of the Gun”), Torontonians again watched in horror in the summer of 2008 as youth were being shot in cars, at bus stops, on streets and highways, or on school property during school hours. Increasingly outraged, they asked politicians and civic leaders, “What's going

on here, and why is this still happening?” The Prime Minister’s response has been a proposal to treat the offending youth as adults and to allow long-term sentences up to and including life imprisonment.

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The unrest and criminal activity found in many of today’s cities are certainly not restricted to areas that have been traditionally regarded as “ghetto” or “inner city.”1

As Wacquant (2008) explains,

all have at their disposal in their topographical lexicon a special term for designating those stigmatized neighbourhoods situated at the very bottom of the hierarchical system of places that compose the metropolis. It is these districts draped in a sulfurous aura, where social problems gather and fester, that the urban outcasts of the turn of the century reside, which earns them the disproportionately negative attention of the media, politicians and state managers. They are known, to outsiders and insiders alike, as the “lawless zones,” the “problem estates,” the “no-go areas” or the “wild districts” of the city, territories of deprivation and dereliction to be feared, fled from and shunned because they are—or such is their reputation, but in these matters perception contributes powerfully to fabricating reality—hotbeds of violence, vice and social dissolution. Owing to the halo of danger and dread that enshrouds them and to the scorn that afflicts their inhabitants, a variegated mix of dispossessed households, dishonoured minorities and disenfranchised immigrants, they are typically depicted from above and from afar in somber and monochrome tones. And social life in them thus appears to be somewhere the same: barren, chaotic and brutish. (1)

In the past, Wacquant’s description of these deprived areas might have been applicable to the city and not the suburbs. But today such is not the case. In Canada, as in Europe and the United States, there are “no-go areas” or “lawless zones” in the suburbs of most large cities. German planner Tom Sieverts has proposed the term

Zwischenstadt or “in-between city” (Sieverts, 2003) to describe those metropolitan areas

that are considered to be neither part of the urban downtown or centre city nor part of the suburban countryside. And, although much attention has been paid to the affairs of the inner city, an increasingly large part of the metropolitan population has come to live and work in these "in-between cities," in what the United Way has termed "inner- suburbs" (United Way of Greater Toronto and Canadian Council on Social Development, 2004).

In this chapter, we look into some of the tensions and dilemmas of everyday life in inner-suburban schools and communities and ask whether more could not be done to address the social fragmentation, economic exclusion, political marginalization, and personal alienation that are part of the new inner-suburban reality. We begin from the assumption that poverty is an educational issue and that schools, and by implication teachers, have a responsibility to find ways to engage with these communities and to work with parents, activists, and social service providers to develop strategies and action plans that will change the conditions that limit the academic achievement and restrict the educational opportunities of children living in poverty. A more inclusive approach to curriculum and pedagogy, we argue, depends on developing a kind of knowledge and understanding of community life that is only possible through community engagement.

Our discussion is informed by Mark Warren’s assertion that the project of urban school reform needs to be linked to the revitalization of marginalized and poor communities and to his claim that, for this revitalization to happen, there needs to be a much greater degree of collaboration between schools and community organizations

Wacquant (2008) also writes that the word “ghetto” is used in the United States, “banlieue in France, quartieri periferici (or degradati) in Italy, problamområde in Sweden, favela in Brazil and villa

The Urbanization of Suburbia 117

(Warren, 2005). “The fates of urban schools and communities are linked,” writes Warren, “yet school reformers and community builders typically act as if they are not” (Warren, 2005, 133). He emphasizes that such collaborations can serve to strengthen “social capital” in communities, thereby enabling schools and teachers to become important players in initiating and supporting social, political, and economic changes aimed at addressing alienation, systemic racism, and poverty (see also Fine and Burns, 2005; Gillborn, 2005). Warren identifies four major clusters of problems or issues that are best addressed through school-community collaborations: poverty, teachers’ lack of understanding of their students’ lives, an alienating and discriminatory curriculum and pedagogy, and lack of adequate resources.

We explore the relations between two of those clusters: teachers’ knowledge and understanding of students and their communities and the importance of an inclusive and community-engaged approach to curriculum and pedagogy. We insist that more attention has to be paid to the link between student achievement and student engagement and that, with respect to curriculum and pedagogy, there is an important but underexplored connection between student engagement and community engagement. We argue that the key to developing an inclusive and community-engaged approach to curriculum and pedagogy lies in establishing relationships of reciprocity and mutuality between schools and communities. We want to encourage teachers to engage parents, community activists, and social service providers to develop the kinds of knowledge and understanding of community life that would enable new, creative approaches to curriculum and pedagogy, which would, in turn, engage students and contribute to their academic achievement. Our approach to community engagement is twofold. First, we examine initiatives aimed at bringing parents and community members into the school. These initiatives generally conform to what Warren identifies as a “service model” of school-community collaboration (Warren, 2005, 140). Second, we examine initiatives aimed at bringing teachers into the community. These kinds of initiatives resemble what Warren refers to as an “organizing model” of school- community collaboration (Warren, 2005, 152). We conclude by examining the potential contribution of critical place-based education (Gruenwald and Smith, 2008a) as a framework for thinking about a curriculum and pedagogy of engagement for inner- suburban schools and communities. We take the view that without school-community collaborations and a curriculum and pedagogy of engagement, the kinds of social, political, and economic changes that would serve the needs and interests of marginalized and poor communities are unlikely to occur.

Years of working in inner-city and inner-suburban schools and countless conversations with students, teachers, parents, and community workers provide the grounds of the analysis we put forward in this chapter. Our discussion makes reference to reports and programme ideas developed by the Toronto District School Board (TDSB)—a board with which we are particularly familiar through our ongoing work with its members. The Toronto District School Board (and the legacy boards that preceded school board amalgamation) has a long history of grappling with the changing demographics of students living in both the inner city and the inner suburbs. The knowledge and information that emerges from studies and initiatives that the TDSB has undertaken have the potential to provide valuable insights that can be useful in thinking about and working with inner-suburban schools in other contexts.

The basis of community-engaged education

Schools, we contend, cannot be regarded as existing apart from communities. Rather, to be effective, they need to find ways to build partnerships with community- based organizations to better provide comprehensive (or what are often termed

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“wrap-around”) services to the children and families in their communities. Describing such schools as “neighborhood hubs,” Warren writes that “community schools typically stay open after school hours and on weekends. They usually offer health, after school, and family support services, and many also provide adult education, ESL, and other programmes for parents and neighborhood residents” (Warren, 2005, 140). Furthermore, school-community partnership can help to improve the day-to-day life and ultimately the overall health of communities. Indeed, as Jean Anyon (1994) argues, “A healthy community is more likely to produce a healthy school” (28). Hence, attempts to address educational needs must necessarily address social needs as well because, as Anyon also points out, “attention to the inner workings of a school may have little effect if the social context in which the school is embedded overrides those efforts ... [W]hat we should be doing—along with trying to fix what goes on in the school—is to attempt to reform (restructure, if you will) the economic, cultural, and political institutions of the community from which the school emerges” (Anyon, 1994, 28).

The community-engaged education that emerges from such reforms necessarily addresses the particularities of communities, giving voice to the people who know communities best—the people who live in them. In setting out the features of a critical pedagogy of place, David Greenwood (2008) has some suggestions for how to think about “living well where we are.” He encourages asking these questions:

What happened here? What is happening now? What should happen here? These historical, experiential, and ethical questions suggest multiple responses given that communities are culturally diverse and different people will tell different stories about the same community. The concepts of decolonization and reinhabitation, and a related set of questions (What needs to be conserved, transformed, restored, or created—here?), can provide pragmatic direction for inquiry and action while helping to bring together educators working for social justice and those working for ecological sustainability. The juxtaposition of decolonization and reinhabitation is productive because the simple pairing demands a blended cultural and ecological lens on place and curriculum. It invites educators who think primarily about culture to consider environment more deeply; it invites educators who think primarily about environment to consider culture more deeply. (Greenwood, 2008, 339)

An approach to community-engaged education that is geared toward inner- suburban youth would not be, as Gruenwald and Smith (2008b) contend, “only about creating the economic conditions that make staying [in the community] possible” but also “about conserving and creating patterns of connectedness and mutuality that are the foundation of community well-being” (xvi). In the following sections, we give a brief description of today’s new suburban context and then go on to discuss how schools and communities can collaborate to improve the conditions of both.

The new suburban context and the new suburbanites

Driving through the inner suburbs (which is the only first-hand experience many Torontonians have of these communities), one is struck more by a sense of monotony and apparent economic stability than overt poverty and economic hardship. These are not “inner cities” in any conventional sense—no abandoned properties or vehicles, no boarded up homes or factories. Rather, there are streets and streets of detached and semi-detached houses, bungalows and townhouses, shopping centres and strip malls, fast-food and doughnut shops, parking lots and parkettes, and clusters of high-rise condominiums and apartment buildings. The ordinariness of these neighbourhoods often conceals the social problems related to poverty and hunger, the unemployment

The Urbanization of Suburbia 119

and underemployment, the street crime and violence that would mark them as “inner- city” suburbs. Created in the late 60s and early 70s, the inner suburbs are the result of a combination of factors that include a significant increase in public housing development, shifts in thinking about urban planning and design, local governmental residential policies, increases in immigration,2 _{and the affordability of houses in these}

areas, especially for first- and second-generation Canadians.

In Canada, as Logan (2003) says of the United States, “there is strong evidence that immigrants are now major contributors to suburbanization” (8). But today’s inner- suburban neighbourhoods are not necessarily as integrated as we would expect. Rather, residential patterns tend to be influenced, in part, by social, economic, and cultural factors reflective of solidarity, shared interests, and shared identities of residents (Bauder and Sharpe, 2002; Crow and Maclean, 2000). The result is that earlier residents (many of European descent) of older established suburban communities migrate outward to new outer suburban areas to be replaced by more recently arrived ethnic and racial minority immigrants (Phelan and Schneider, 1996). In fact, as DeWolf (2004) writes of Canadian cities,

Suburbia is becoming increasingly diverse. More and more middle-class immigrants are skipping traditional ethnic enclaves and heading straight for the boonies, where strip malls are now filled with ethnic businesses, bubble- tea parlours dot the landscape and schools fill up with kids from any number of different backgrounds. Forget suburbia; this is ethnoburbia.23

So the suburbs of today do not necessarily conform to the stereotype of homogeneity and affluence. Instead, suburbia is likely to be socially and culturally diverse, often with conditions that are much more like the “inner city” in terms of social and political marginalization, economic exclusion, conflict with schools and the police, nutrition-related health issues, and a host of other effects of poverty and racism (see also Phelan and Schneider, 1996).

Living as a marginalized person in poverty in the suburbs makes everything from grocery shopping to seeing a doctor more difficult. Suburban sprawl means that everything is far away and the new “user-pay” approach to what used to be “public transportation” means that taking a bus anywhere is expensive. Living in poverty in the inner suburbs also means living far away from good paying jobs in construction or in industries that require cars to get to job sites (in the outer suburbs) and factories (increasingly located in poor rural communities). Jobs that are accessible by public transit are typically high skill, high pay, professional jobs (for which kids from the inner suburbs are not often qualified) or low skill, low paying jobs in the retail and service sectors (for which there are many more applicants than jobs, a condition that often leads to all manner of exploitation). With so few options open to them, inner- suburban residents, not surprisingly, experience alienation and disillusionment,

2 _{Up until the 1970, most of the immigrants to Canada were Europeans, with post–World War II}

immigrants being mainly from eastern and southern European (Troper, 2003). Breton et al. (1990) write that “the liberalization of immigration policies during the 1960s and 1970s significantly increased the non-European component of immigration, the bulk of which has been destined for Ontario, and in particular, its largest CMAs [central metropolitan areas]” (17). See also Preston and Wong (2002).

3 _{The term “ethnoburbia” was first coined in the 1990s by Arizona State University geography}

professor Wei Li who observed that the Chinatown of San Gabriel Valley, Los Angeles was quite different from the traditional Chinatown in the downtown area of Los Angeles (DeWolf, 2004). But “unlike traditional ethnic neighbourhoods,” DeWolf writes, “ethnoburbs are affluent and diverse, home to a wide variety of ethnic groups and income levels” (1).

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which both cause and are caused by rising levels of youth unemployment and of related criminal activities (and street crime).

In today’s suburban communities, therefore, schools need to address the complex realities of students and parents, specifically those of marginalized or immigrant backgrounds who, in real or imagined ways, attempt to live out what might be considered “middle-class” lives in the suburbs (James and Saul, 2007) or in what Wooden and Blazak (2001) refer to as “suburban hoods.” In such a context, detached from the downtown area of the city with its appeal in terms of social, cultural, recreational, and employment opportunities, schools for many of these suburban youth might be expected to double as meeting places where, with friends in a similar position, they try to make sense of their lives, envision their educational and occupational possibilities, and, for those of immigrant backgrounds,4 _{deal with issues of identity}

and social status (Dyson, 2001; Li, 2001; Wooden and Blazak, 2001).

Clearly, the inner-suburban areas are not immune to the issues resulting from poverty, racial and ethnic diversity, and racism and discrimination—these issues are not confined to inner city or the city boundaries. Hence, if schools are to serve the best interest of students, educators’ efforts must help address absenteeism, disengagement, alienation, drop-outs or stop-outs, and low achievement that are often the case with poor and marginalized students irrespective of neighbourhood. The idea is for teachers to work with parents to address their fears and maintain their hopes and dreams of what is possible for their children in society—the very reason that many parents moved their children to the suburbs and placed their hopes in suburban schooling.

Building mutuality and reciprocity: Bringing parents and community in/to school

In schools serving poor and marginalized communities, it is not uncommon to hear teachers and administrators talk about schools as “islands of peace, tranquility, and order” in a “sea of danger, criminality, and chaos.” They are understandably proud of efforts to create safe and caring environments where students are given a chance to succeed and to make better lives for themselves. However, when parents in these same communities speak about schools, they often describe them as “prisons” or “fortresses” where families and their cultures are “disrespected” and where parents are made to feel unwelcome. Mutual misunderstanding and suspicion, and the resulting tension and mistrust between teachers and parents or community members, make school-community collaborations difficult. Yet efforts to address such misunderstandings, to face such tensions, and to work to establish informed communication and respectful collaboration between schools and communities are finding increasing support from ministries of education and school boards.

Consider, for example, the image of a school included in the Model Schools for

Inner City Task Force Report (Toronto District School Board, 2005). In an appendix

entitled “Imagine… A Day in the Life of a Model Inner City School and its Students,”