"City Studies" are high-school civics programs that use design and art as tools to research and communicate about the city. Students get out of the classroom to interact with NYC and the people who make it work. Students use design-thinking skills to synthesize and to break down complex issues that affect their lives. They learn about the city from real people, and, through interviewing these decision-makers, they learn how they can make their voices heard.

Students not only learn design and media skills, but they learn about the power of design as a tool for research, problem-solving, and effective communication.

CUP works with young people in NYC’s lowest income communities to create programming that takes them from passive absorbers of information to genuine collaborators in a creative project. Working with a classroom teacher, who identifies particular challenges in his or her curriculum—“students don’t do well on their standardized test essays because they don’t know how to read the information graphics,” for example—and a teaching artist, who is interested in collaborating with young people, CUP creates individual programs that combine project-based learning with design skill-building.

Even the best classroom teachers often struggle to animate some topics for students. And in under-resourced schools, teachers have few resources and little time to create their own project-based curricula. In addition, few schools in NYC’s public high school system can afford to offer art programs.

CUP addresses all of these issues by working with educators to create curriculum modules that meet their specific needs and that engage students through hands-on learning. We seek to work with students who are not already excelling in the classroom, and we give them alternatives ways to discover their own skills, passion, and proficiency. By taking on a real-world issues, students learn about how decision-makers shape their communities. And by using design and art to process and communicate what they learned, they obtain new skills and are exposed to professional fields they didn’t know existed.

In 2013, the CUP created seven City Studies projects, examining real issues from New York State’s new gun laws to voting rights.

INTERDISCIPLINARITY. CUP works with students in low-income communities whose lives are disproportionately affected by policy decisions, but who have little access to the decision-makers themselves. Students collaborate with teaching artists and CUP staff in projects that combine methods from the fields of design, information visualization, investigate journalism, and urban studies.

AUTHENTIC COLLABORATION. CUP engages students as collaborators because they have unusual visual approaches and are good a breaking down complex issues into clear information, through playful metaphors, for example. In contrast to many youth educations programs where the adults steer the course of the project, City Studies are collaborative projects where CUP’s teaching enable students to carry out their own design work and communicate issues to those most impacted by those issues. CUP fosters students’ voices, their creativity, their sense of humor, and their sense of civic agency.

PRODUCTION VALUE. While our tools are created by young people we want them go well beyond the boundaries of youth art. Works that are created teach others outside of the classroom. We expect the final products that come our of our youth education projects to reach a high level of usefulness and production value.

CIVICS. Although these are art-based programs, we believe that an authentic opportunity to understand an issue and teach others about it helps students to find their own paths to civic engagement.

CUP works with a teaching artist and a high school teacher to create a curriculum specific to that teacher’s needs. In all of these projects, students get out of the classroom to research an issue in the school’s community and use design to make a product that teaches others how that issue works. Past City Studies have produced a booklet to help high school students counsel their peers in navigating the bureaucracy of cash assistance programs; a guide to voting rights; and a publication on the pros and cons of a proposed soft drink tax. The curriculum CUP develops along with the teaching artist and high school teacher can then be used in subsequent years by the high school teacher with new students.

In “Government In Plain Sight” 9th graders in Jorge Sandoval’s U.S. Government class looked at the topic of federalism—a topic that always appears on standardized tests, but that is as esoteric as it gets. Mr. Sandoval worked with CUP and teaching artist Stephen Fiehn to create a curriculum that takes students into the neighborhood around their school to find instances government regulation first hand.

The group started small by looking for signs of the government in their wallets. Then, they took to the streets looking for evidence of city, state, and federal government involvement around their school in Bushwick, Brooklyn—from FDA labels on food in the bodega, to restaurant grades posted in windows. Finally, they interviewed a bank manager about financial regulation, a pharmacist to understand the role of the government in local businesses and institutions, and an army recruiting officer on federal jurisdiction. After follow-up research on agencies like the FDA, the USDA, and the FDIC, students designed pieces on the role of the government in our everyday lives.

The group’s work culminated in “Government in Plain Sight,” a booklet that can be use as a teaching tool for history, government, and civics classes. The booklet lays out activities that teachers can do with their students to better understand the impact that government has on everything from bodega sales to big banks. Students from “Government in Plain Sight” were the first to use the new tool when they taught sixty of their peers, who were about to take the US History Regents exam, about federalism and where you see the concept playing out in the community.

CUP’s arts education curricula are designed for low-income students, young people who are often negatively affected by the urban environmental issues that they explore through our programs. Many students are residents of public housing or subsidized housing, and attend public high schools in low-income neighborhoods in New York City from the South Bronx to Bushwick. Through City Studies projects students learn to see the city as the product of a decision-making landscape and are empowered to participate in it.

Students gain the skills to investigate their own communities. They gain access to the decision-makers that affect the world around them, and engage in active citizenship. Students learn how to creatively communicate their ideas through design. Project-based learning allows students to shine in multiple ways: from interviewing to illustration, from infographics to writing.

Many of the students we work with are also enjoying one of their few opportunities to experience art and design as an integrated part of their curriculum, and something that is valued as a way to approach problem-solving and to effectively communicate with others. Particularly when we work with students who are recent immigrants and English Language Learners, or who are simply not excelling in the conventional curriculum, we find that the visual production helps them to access a different means of communication and gives them a successful academic experience.

CUP believes in the legibility of the world around us. By learning how to investigate, we train ourselves to change what we see. Our work grows from a belief that the power of imagination is central to the practice of democracy, and that the work of governing must engage the dreams and visions of citizens.

These programs are at the forefront of a new kind of civics education— one that uses the city as its classroom. Students get out of the classroom to research an issue in the school’s community—issues that connect to they are studying in their core classes. Through this collaborative process students understand how to use information graphics in their persuasive writing.

Projects created through “City Studies” programs are being used by educators and urban enthusiasts to teach, and learn, about some of the city’s most complex systems.