Ninth Grade Explores the Urban Landscape of Downtown Santa Barbara

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On April 23, ninth grade students traveled to State Street as part of the fourth annual Grade 9 Downtown Santa Barbara Interdisciplinary Ethnography unit.

Timed to coincide with the Tuesday afternoon Farmers’ Market, this trip is the midpoint of the students’ Urban Studies exploration of downtown Santa Barbara through the lenses of multiple fields of study and is based on research of social issues such as homelessness and gentrification, as well as debates about the State Street Promenade.  

Within this unit, students have the opportunity to be participant observers within a familiar landscape and to broaden understandings of our local community. The State Street corridor to the Funk Zone is a prime location for observing the juxtaposition between old and new developments. This destination allows students to explore our local, complex, and ever-changing city within a relatively small, vibrant space that is in a state of flux. Students were asked to walk a familiar path but with the lens of an ethnographer. 

The goal of this unit is for students and faculty to come together to push outside of comfort zones and actively engage with the community. In order to provide important context for understanding and engaging with the homeless community, students and faculty devoted a community time period to learn from Laguna’s SOCK Club community partners, Kayla Petersen and DJ Johnsen, both representatives of the nonprofit Kingdom Causes, along with their guest, Gerard. 

“The most important addition this year were the candid and extraordinary messages from Gerard, whose lived experience profoundly affected all of us gathered in the library,” says Faculty Guide Ashley Tidey. “In my twenty years at Laguna, I’ve never seen students so moved by a speaker, as he invited them and even encouraged them to open their hearts and minds through conversation to the communities of people experiencing homelessness.”

With the guidance of Dean of Students Blake Dorfman, students and faculty learned about ethics and expectations around observing people, cultures, and places, and interacting with people you don’t know—and then writing about it. Through collaborative ethnography and observations, students were asked to think about what it means to walk, talk, look, and and listen in a city, and to grapple with real-world questions. 

“Each aspect of my surroundings–whether it was the man experiencing homelessness praying while sitting on the pavement or the young lady setting up her vegetable stand at the farmers market–offered a completely unique story,” says Clover Guillemane.

Yikai Feng's reflection on the State Street field trip encapsulates a poignant juxtaposition of societal realities. “The State Street field trip left a deep impression on me,” he reflects. “The beautiful downtown Spanish architecture, expensive specialty stores, luxury cars, and tourists wearing fancy clothes form a stark contrast to the unhoused people wearing torn clothes on downtown streets. It seems that we are living in a time of irony and contradiction – the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Santa Barbara–paradise–is no exception.”

According to English Instructor Mayumi Kodani, the downtown unit is an excellent end-of-year opportunity to take students out into the world while requiring them to use the tools they've learned in the classroom. “They see familiar things in unfamiliar ways, they strike up conversations they never would have had before, and then they get to write about it in descriptive, non-essay-ish ways with pictures! It's research-based, it's collaborative, and I think it helps students feel more connected to their local community," she says. 

This Interdisciplinary Ethnography unit goes beyond traditional pedagogy by empowering students to become active participants in the narrative of their community while nurturing a curiosity for exploration and understanding.