Creating a Contact Zone: Negotiating the Boundaries of an Urban Classroom

We are convinced that moments of ethical uncertainty offer pivotal and
productive opportunities for educators who are concerned with the relationship between pedagogy and power in the contemporary liberal multicultural milieu. In this paper, we reflect on two separate attempts to move learning outside the humanities classroom and into the city itself. First we discuss our experiences in the classroom and the perceived incommensurability between our roles as educators teaching the importance of civic engagement and the space of the classroom as separate or isolated from the rest of the city. In particular, we reflect upon our own assumptions in the process of developing an assignment called “The City as Text” wherein students were asked to read one of five pre-chosen neighborhoods in Toronto
as a text. Using concepts introduced in lectures and course readings to
interpret these spaces, students considered questions of belonging, represented interests and presumptions related to the lifestyle, values, and socioeconomic factors of residents and/or users of the area. Students were asked to examine various historic and contemporary representations of urban
space and culture in Toronto while interrogating their own understandings
of citizenship and urban belonging. We examine the challenges and potential pedagogical opportunities that arose from student responses and caused
us to wonder how we might prepare students for encounters with unfamiliar communities and urban experiences and how these lessons fit with the
broader goals of the urban university’s education mandate