Julie Mehretu is a postmodern cartographer whose body of work signifies the "abstract non-place" of becoming-Other. Her concepts of identity and journey are traced upon this non-hierarchical and inherently social plane (above) as if representative of the new educational landscape. It is on this smoothed-over space that learning begins to reflect our rapidly changing world, thereby inscribing upon it movements of difference. However, this is not being played out in today's schools. Teachers and students, even entire school communities, are caught in an “in-between” of two radically different paradigms. The paradigm of inclusion and 21st-century readiness, while articulated in multiple ways as reiterated throughout this portfolio, is suffocated by the logic and infrastructure of a past in which no one could imagine the virtual worlds, unforeseen and instantaneous migrations, robotics, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, bio-engineering, and gene therapies that plot a different kind of world order, and all of this at a time when, according to the OECD, economic inequality continues to grow in the developed world at a unprecedented rate. If increasing numbers of students are living in poverty and thirteen percent of school-age students are designated as a 'child with a disability' , then we must reach students earlier and more effectively, and it doesn't seem to be happening at a fast enough pace (Bryant, pg. 44).

 

There is an enormous responsibility that we have as educators and it begins with creating dynamic classrooms of change- not unlike Mehretu's paintings- that can move students from varying expressions of impoverishment into spaces for future creation and collaboration. While considering this goal can be paralyzing in the face of such challenge, it must begin somewhere, even if that place is in effect a “non-place”. What we have learned in this course is a point of departure for shifting culture: frameworks for valuing humanness and relationships, while offering clear pathways for children who need supports to be identified early and to receive effective interventions so that critical thinking as well as social and emotional development can eventually happen while at the same time universally designing our curricula so that there are opportunities for all students to grow. Through this shift we can begin to map a new space in which accessibility and inclusion are considered the core values driving every education-related decision and in this way we continue to open those spaces so that students can become other-than the machines that will doubtless supply them with any information they may need as long as they have the human skills and critical capacities with which to navigate it.

       

                                                References

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Bryant, D. P., Bryant, B. R., & Smith, D. D. (2017). Teaching students with special needs in inclusive classrooms. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.

 

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2008). A thousand plateaus capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum.

 

Firstenberg, Laurie. (2002). Painting Platform in NY. Flash Art, 35.(227), 70.

 

Social and welfare issues, Income Inequality and Poverty. (2016, November). Retrieved April 22, 2018, from http://www.oecd.org/social/inequality-and-poverty.htm

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