The U School

Neighborhood: North Philadelphia
The U School is a competency-based school designed to change the college and career outcomes of Philadelphia youth by challenging young people to create high quality projects and take ownership of their learning.

Fall 2019
Classroom Teacher: Josh Kleiman
Teaching-Artist: Aki Torii

10th and 11th grade students from The U School engaged in a pochoir and embroidery project inspired by The Politics of Rhetoric. Each student was asked to write two phrases: the first, a stereotype that is projected on them based on age, race, gender, etc.; the second, rewrite the stereotype to represent the truth. Students used handmade and existing stencils as matrices and printed using pochoir (pushing pigment through a stencil with a brush) on canvas. Final projects were “self-portrait flags” which included their phrases and a printed self-portrait. The flags were embellished using embroidery techniques.