News Sowing Seeds of Hope in San Juan Raquel Jimenez’s Arts and Cultural Organizing Intensive course sends students to Puerto Rico to make an impact during J-Term Posted January 31, 2025 By Ryan Nagelhout Arts in Education Families and Community Informal and Out-of-School Learning HGSE students Cinta Xia, Yilan Sun, and Maria Ximena Valenzuela with HGSE Artist-in-Residence Ruth Henry and Laura Smith-Centeno, special guest artist and creative director, Raw Art Works Photo: Rosa Cabán In January, students returning early to HGSE dealt with Cambridge’s first significant snowfall of the winter season. But not every J-Term class endured chilly walks from Gutman Library to Longfellow or Larsen Hall. Those enrolled in Raquel Jimenez’s Arts and Cultural Organizing Intensive were in sunny Puerto Rico, meeting students and working with local artists and educators to learn more about how the archipelago’s identity and culture are shaped.Jimenez, co-chair of HGSE’s Arts and Learning Concentration, took 10 students to San Juan, Puerto Rico, as part of a J-Term course that builds upon a class she taught in the fall, Practices in Community and Public Art. The goal of both courses is to teach how art can help communities create self-determined stories of public life, forge solidarities across lines of difference, and support the holistic goals of education.Students in the fall semester class led community arts workshops across campus and elsewhere in the Boston community, but Jimenez envisioned her students taking those skills gained and seeing how other places have embraced art and arts education to enrich their culture.“Artists on the island are doing some really crucial work. Puerto Rico — and San Juan, in particular — is becoming known as a mecca of contemporary art. The artists there are making art that is deeply connected to all of these different issues that are specific to Puerto Rico like colonialism, late-stage capitalism, and climate change,” says Jimenez. “I really wanted my students to be there and explore all of these complicated issues and how artists are responding to them because while these issues may be specific to Puerto Rico, they also resonate in places across the globe.” HGSE student Jada Wooten, transcribing children’s dreams onto the mural with a paint pen Photo: Rosa Cabán After a two-day orientation in Cambridge, the J-Term course had three different strands of work in Puerto Rico, starting with a community artmaking project at a public elementary school in San Juan. They also conducted site visits with leading arts and cultural organizations, along with a series of intensive workshops with renowned Puerto Rican performance artist and educator Javier Cardona Otero, Ph.D.Their work at Escuela Hernández Y Gaetán, a school in San Juan’s Santurce neighborhood, featured a workshop with fourth through sixth graders who were asked to make stencils and write about what dreams they had for themselves, their school, and their community.The result was a mural, “Dreaming is a Human Right,” designed by HGSE students as well as Ed School artist-in-residence Ruth Henry, and Laura Smith-Centeno, a licensed art therapist and creative director at Raw Art Works, a youth program in Lynn, Massachusetts. The stencils made by grade school students served as the mural’s “seeds” and represent their dreams, which were written in Spanish.“This wasn’t conceived as a research project for me, but what I’m interested in is taking a close look at all of this dream data to understand what children want for their futures,” says Jimenez. “And also to think about what are the educational practices by which teachers on the island can begin to make that happen?As Jimenez explains, educational divestment is a serious issue in Puerto Rico, a situation exacerbated by the devastating impact of Hurricane Maria in 2017. About half of schools on the archipelago have closed over the past decade, and as its population ages, the lack of educational opportunities has become an existential threat to the island’s future. Students at the Hernández Y Gaetán elementary school generating stencils for the mural Photo: Raquel Jimenez “When schools close in Puerto Rico, it’s about so much more than the loss of a physical building,” Jimenez explains. “It really is the loss of a sense of a dignified future on the island.”Puerto Rico, says Jimenez, “is governed by the US Department of Education and is classified as a single school district. At 250,000 children, this makes Puerto Rico the seventh largest school district in the United States — but Puerto Rico is usually overlooked in federal education discourse because it is a colony.”The impact a small group of students could have on the island, though, was proof to Jimenez that the landscape there is fertile ground for further collaboration and change . The effect was clear on her students, who had an immersive experience a few months into their master’s programs, and on the students in Puerto Rico who took part in the workshops and saw their dreams brought to life at their own school.Some HGSE students were even able to join an arts and theater collective, Agua Sol y Sereno, as they led the parade procession during this year’s SanSe festival parade, the biggest and most significant cultural festival in Puerto Rico.“When we were there, art was everywhere. It was in the street. It was in our faces. It wasn’t something that needed to be locked away in an institution,” says Jimenez. “I really wanted students to understand that and this is something that our time with Agua Sol Y Sereno underscored. My class in the fall, I was theoretically saying that all the time, and they theoretically understood. But for them to be there and have that embodied experience and see it, I think that was a profound experience that will make a lasting impression.”The mural project at Escuela Hernández Y Gaetán even drew the attention of Puerto Rico’s governor, who sent an ambassador — the assistant secretary of education — to the school during the mural’s installation while Jimenez and her students were working there.“You could just tell there was a shift in the school culture and a palpable sense of excitement,” says Jimenez. “This is a place where the impact can be tangible. Even within the course of four days.”The trip was made possible in part thanks to the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, as well as the Harvard Puerto Rico Club, which sponsored the students’ lodging while in San Juan. Jimenez hopes the trip planted seeds that will continue to grow a relationship between educators in Cambridge and Puerto Rico that bears real fruit in the coming years.“There’s a dire need for skilled educators in Puerto Rico,” says Jimenez. “I think building that bridge between HGSE and Puerto Rico could be really amazing.” News The latest research, perspectives, and highlights from the Harvard Graduate School of Education Explore All Articles Related Articles News The Future of Learning Outside the Classroom The partnership between HGSE and Sesame Workshop highlighted by popular J-Term course News Community Ties Associate Professor Bianca Baldridge is shining a light on the vitalness of community-based education and youth workers Ed. Magazine No, Pinterest Isn’t the Place to Build Lesson Plans Alum’s nonprofit pilots new play-based early ed curriculum in Boston