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It was Stephen Bloch-Schulman's turn to facilitate class, and he was about to begin. However, he paused for a moment, and a smile crept onto his face.
“Everyone, follow me.”
He grabbed his hat and headed out the door and onto the streets of Greensboro, North Carolina. Everyone—including our other classroom facilitators—was confused but intrigued. We scurried after Stephen.
The class ended up at Center City Park a few blocks down the road. Although not all of us knew it in that moment, the park was contested space. Center City Park had both private and public funding and had rules prohibiting the type of political action one might reasonably expect to occur in a downtown park, such as protests, political speech, and information dissemination.
Disregarding the park's regulations, Stephen set up our class exercise, which entailed students' debating local political issues by taking on different perspectives. Shortly after we began, a park security guard approached our facilitators to inform them that political speech was banned in the park. They replied, “Oh, this is a college class. This is for educational purposes.” And with that, the befuddled security guard backed off, since it became evident how unclear the rules of the park were to everyone.
Maggie Castor (mcastor@elon.edu) is an activist in Greensboro, NC, and a senior at Elon University who plans to graduate in May 2012.
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