Middle School Classroom Chronicle
Student mural critique at San Francisco's Balmy Alley
Middle School Spanish Teacher, Jaime Vallar
Every spring the eighth graders make a field trip to San Francisco’s Mission District. Balmy Alley is the best place to see the most concentrated collection of murals in the City. The murals began in the mid-1980s as an expression of artists' outrage over human rights and political abuses in Central America. Today the alley contains murals on a myriad of styles and subjects from human rights to local gentrification.
Walking through the Mission district in San Francisco is as much of a cultural experience as the mural critique. Seeing and listening to a mixture of Asian, Latino and Middle Eastern people and languages and seeing and smelling the many different kinds of foods help create a feeling of being far from home while actually being only a few BART station stops away.
After walking Balmy Alley for the mural critique students eat lunch at one of the many great Mission District taquerias. Of course, the students order en español. When they return to school, the students reflect on their field trip in discussions on the use of art as a medium for chronicling social-political sentiment then and now.
This trip, like many of the others St. Paul’s students take throughout the year, is a way of combining multiple content areas in one activity while simultaneously acquiring on-site learning away from the School. The goal is to tie together language, art, culture and history of the past as we analyze the historical implications for today and highlights our commitment to diversity and inclusion. The Mission keeps changing and evolving with the ever changing political climate and policies. The artists through their murals reflect those changes.