Search Results

This chapter examines what spatial fixations that arose through designers' processes of problematizing and rendering technical excluded and how they fared once the Downtown School for Design, Media, and Technology became operational. It considers how forces that were excluded by educational reformers' fixations overflowed the project once it was launched. More specifically, it shows how fixation limited and distorted the ways that reformers imagined space. The chapter contrasts reformers' imaginings of connected but circumscribed “learning environments” with the ways that parents and caregivers helped construct and connect socially differentiated spaces for their children. It also explores racialized and classed geographies of New York City in relation to spatial fixations as well as the relationship between spatial fixations and school choice.

This chapter examines the emergence of the Downtown School for Design, Media, and Technology within the context of historical cycles of purportedly disruptive educational reform in the United States. It considers how reformers' inability to remedy the social and political problems with which education has repeatedly and increasingly been tasked—which reformers also recurrently promise to fix—help produce conditions in which both crises in education and calls for disruptive remedies can recurrently arise. Against this historical backdrop, the chapter shows how particular cycles of disruptive fixation occurred as the Downtown School's designers and reformers responded to calls for disruption by engaging in problematization and rendering technical processes.

This chapter examines how reformers imagined subjects that would be amenable to and fixable with their intervention in comparison with the ways that students negotiated identification and difference with each other at school and online. It considers how problematization and rendering technical processes produce amenable and fixable subjects, how these intended beneficiaries exert unanticipated pressures on a philanthropic intervention, and how the reformers tend to respond to such pressures in rather retrograde ways. In the case of the Downtown School for Design, Media, and Technology, reformers imagined the project's intended beneficiaries as digital kids, a population that presumably would be especially amenable to the intervention's focus on gaming and new media production. The chapter also discusses assembling of affinities and divisions among amenable and fixable subjects, conditions of sanctioned nonconformity, crossing of boundaries, and identities-in-practice in relation to subject fixations.

This chapter examines how powerful factions of the local community—in this case privileged parents of the Downtown School for Design, Media, and Technology—can wrest a philanthropic intervention and steer it toward their own ends and how reformers are compelled to acquiesce to these demands. As part of reformers' community fixations, parents and educators were imagined as connectable to each other in unprecedented ways thanks to recent advances in information and communication technologies, although the reformers also planned to offer more conventional mechanisms for parental involvement, such as the Parent–Teacher Association (PTA). The chapter first considers how parents were involved in community fixations at the Downtown School and how their hysteria about bullying and threats of exit fueled reformers' fears of an imminent collapse of their philanthropic project before discussing idealizations and conditions of community involvement as they relate to community fixations.

This chapter examines educational reformers' fixations about pedagogic activity and empirically develops the notion of sanctioned counterpractices. Like spatial fixations, pedagogic fixations occur through problematization and rendering technical processes. However, pedagogic fixations focus on changing persons rather than on spaces per se. They help reformers act, think, and feel as if the activities they are imagining and designing for others are both novel and in the best interest of their recipients. At the same time, pedagogic fixations exclude factors and forces that create various unanticipated problems for reformers as soon as they launch their intervention. The chapter considers the disparity between the limited role of sanctioned counterpractices in the Downtown School for Design, Media, and Technology's everyday routines and yet their prominence in ritualized self-presentations of the project.

This book has shown that daily life at the Downtown School for Design, Media, and Technology involved a lot of rote and scripted behavior despite the reformers' promise of unprecedented creativity, improvisation, and fun. These reformers believed they were opening the school to the world, but in several highly problematic areas educators and, in particular, privileged parents worked to seal it off. They hoped to appeal to students' inherent interests and overcome social division but ended up with a system that removed many of the most uncomfortable underprivileged. Given that techno-philanthropism routinely falls far short of reformers' stated ideals, the chapter asks how it can be that cycles of disruptive fixation predictably persist. It also considers the beneficiaries of a “failed” cycle of disruptive fixation and how such failure allow participants to repair and maintain their idealism, at least for a while.