New York is Now Home: Spaces Supporting Literacy for Adult Immigrants
New York is Now Home: Spaces Supporting Literacy for Adult Immigrants will engage our community partner, University Settlement, focusing on their adult literacy program that serves immigrant students, co-designing with Pratt students and faculty to enhance an educational environment that best serves the needs of the neighborhood immigrant community and adjacent University Settlement programs. As the first settlement house in the United States, dating from 1886, University Settlement continues today to advocate for justice and equity, creating spaces for people to meet, organize, and build community strength through its neighborhood-based programs.
University Settlement’s adult literacy and education program provides free English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes, which extend beyond English grammar competency to promote self-advocacy skills that lead to social and economic inclusion. Ultimately, ESOL programming opposes poverty and systematic inequality found within immigrant communities. The current spatial conditions for the program, however, are not conducive for students to gather and do not adequately support the organization’s different programming and scheduling needs.
The supporting framework for this community engagement project is an elective course to be offered in spring 2025 at Pratt, co-taught by two faculty with strong interdisciplinary experience ranging from architecture, interior design, industrial design, and communications design.This collaboration will provide Pratt students an opportunity to design with the adult literacy students and staff at University Settlement to create physical installations that respond to the adult ESOL students' educational needs explored through a series of workshops with the community partner during the semester. These conversations highlight the need for shared communication—in all forms—among the various disciplines, communities, and cultures where language and literacy are foregrounded as essential tools of expression, exchange, and empowerment.