Final Project: Proposal
A Prior Teacher Grading The System
Abstract:
This project is a walking-based, interventionist art project that uses the symbolic authority of a teacher's red pen to critique Tucson's public spaces. As a former elementary school teacher and current art education student, I will walk through neighborhoods where I grew up and leave handwritten "grades" on sidewalks, signage, fences, and civic infrastructure using red chalk or red pen on sticky notes. These critiques will comment on equity, accessibility, cultural neglect, and physical maintenance. The comments will be documented in photographs and possibly compiled into a zine or photo essay. Drawing from Situationist strategies of the dérive and détournement, the project transforms casual walking into a performance of institutional critique. Instead of grading students, I grade the systems around them. This intervention seeks to reveal what is broken or neglected and to reframe public space as a site for reflection, accountability, and poetic protest.
Artist Statement/Background Information
This project comes from experiences being a former K-6 teacher and a current art education teacher. In the classroom, grading is a routine expectation. This being said, the deeper issue lies in how those grades are usually weaponized due to standardized testing, accountability policies, and funding threats. While grading and feedback are meant to help guide learning, they have now also become a measure of worth for students, teachers, and the entire school community. My concern isn’t with the grading itself, although it can sometimes be quite subjective, but rather with the power structures at play and the systematic inequities it reinforces, especially in underfunded schools like the ones I’ve taught at. I began to question: What if this evaluative language were redirected? What if the systems themselves were graded? This project explores those questions by repositioning teacher feedback in public space, flipping the target of assessment from student to structure
Being inspired by the situation and ideas of Détournement and Dérive, this project is now flipping the script. By walking through familiar spaces in Tucson, especially those related to education, care, and community infrastructure, I reflect critically on what I once accepted as normal. I use temporary materials like chalk and sticky notes to leave grades that mimic classroom feedback but speak to broader institutional neglect. Comments typically left on students papers in any subject will appear on broken sidewalks, faded signs, or fenced-off lots. These small interventions will operate as poetic critiques and visual disruptions.
I am influenced by Situationist strategies such as the dérive and détournement, as discussed by McKenzie Wark in The Beach Beneath the Street. The derive allows me to move through space emotionally and critically, while detournement enables me to subvert the traditional meaning of grading and redirect it toward systems of power. Artists like Krzysztof Wodiczko, ACT UP, and Alfredo Jaar also inform this work, especially their use of public space to make structural critique visible. Ultimately, this project uses walking and observation as tools of reflection and reclamation. It is both a public critique and a personal act of reimagining what education, care, and accountability could look like in the world beyond the classroom.
3 prior drawings/images/video links of previous works that relate to this project:
Project 1
My ephemeral shadow piece, although grounded in a different medium, shares a similar conceptual and methodological framework. Both this final project and the shadow project utilize temporary materials (chalk, paper, and the rocks) to make marks that respond to the earth's natural conditions over time. While one is based on following the earth's natural rhythms and the final project is focused on poetic critique throughout the duration of a walk, both reflect the idea of walking, the act of noticing, and impermanence.
Walk 3
Both Walk 3 and my idea for my final project use walking as a way to observe and reimagine public space. In walk 3 we were asked to observe in the eyes of a specific social scheme, finding marks, evidence, desires, and dangers that relate to it. Similarly, my final project will be focusing on placing myself in the 'teacher' mindset, focusing on how our environment either supports the graded criteria or fails it.
Walk 6
Walk 6 utilized walking as a method of disrupting the ways we move through space. It was a form of intervention, emphasizing presence, observation, and reflection, which this final project will intertwine. By slowing down and altering my mindset to focus on critiquing space, the act of writing the critiques will then shape how I interact with the public space.
Detailed Proposal:
This will be a socially engaged, site-specific walking project that critiques public infrastructure in Tucson using the familiar language of classroom grading. I will walk through several public areas, including school zones, sidewalks, parks, and neglected buildings, and leave temporary "grades" written in red chalk or on sticky notes with red pen. These comments will mimic teacher feedback but be directed at environmental and institutional failures rather than students. For example, a cracked sidewalk on a public sidewalk might receive the comment, "F—Needs work. Please fix."
The performance will unfold over 2 to 3 days of walking in neighborhoods I know well. At each site, I will write or leave my comment and photograph it in its location. The tone will range from poetic to bureaucratic, echoing teacher feedback forms but reframed to challenge civic and spatial neglect while also pointing out where it's succeeding. These written grades act as a public archive of what is often left unspoken, like the emotional impact of underinvestment, broken systems, and exclusion from space.
Inspired by the Situationist practice of the dérive, I will walk not to reach a destination but to see familiar places with new awareness. McKenzie Wark writes that the derive allows us to map cities through emotion and critique rather than utility. My final project uses that method to reveal the hidden curriculum of urban space, what it teaches us about power, access, and value. The act of grading becomes a détournement, repurposing institutional language to confront the very systems it once upheld.
This is not metaphorical grading, rather, it is a correction of space using temporary, ethical materials. My identity as a former teacher informs the authority of this critique but also adds personal resonance to the act of turning my former tools against the institutions that shaped me. The final output will be a photographic series, potentially developed into a zine or blog archive. Each photo will be captioned with the critique and location.
Ultimately, it will challenge you to consider: If students are held accountable for revising their work, then why are the systems and everyday spaces not? It also serves as a discourse on what feedback is or could be. Could grades and feedback be too subjective?
At least 3 drawings/sketches/images/videos accompanying the proposal:
Imagine this but written in chalk near places that don't support inclusion, equity, or Tucson culture or are not kept up well. In new york, they have a grading system for every restaurant and building that people enter to describe to them whether that building is up to code. This project would be similar to that, but it will focus on personal critique.
Timeline and a realistic budget:
Timeline: 2 to 3 expected days of work. Depending on the weather, I will either go on multiple walks and write as I go, or I will be scouting multiple areas to then come back to with pre-thought-of messages. The goal is the first choice.
Budget: realistically, these are things I already own as a teacher. If I do not already have these items at home or at my parents house, here is an expected budget:
This proposal is incredibly powerful, thoughtful, poetic, and sharp in its critique. I love how you’ve reimagined the red pen, not as a tool of judgment toward students, but as a form of public accountability. Your framing of the project as a dérive-driven, site-specific performance gives it both emotional depth and conceptual clarity. It’s not just a clever flip, it’s a deeply personal and socially engaged act.
ReplyDeleteYour reflection on how grading is weaponized in education really struck me, especially coming from your lived experience as a teacher. By redirecting that evaluative lens toward the systems themselves, you're calling out the environments that fail both students and communities—and you're doing it in a way that’s accessible, visually striking, and grounded in care.