Educating beyond the borders of schooling

In our recent interviews with 154 poor and working-class young adults, male and female, across racial and ethnic groups, we hear whispers of hope amid the narratives of despair. In both Jersey City and Buffalo, we have wandered through communities that have been ravaged by deindustrialization and a withering of the public sphere. Here we turn our attention to what Boyte and Evans call "free spaces" - those spaces in which hope is nourished in spite of impoverished material circumstances. Offering a wider theoretical frame for understanding the social psychology of these spaces than has been offered in previous work, we provide two examples from ethnographic investigations (of an arts community and a spiritual community) as emblems of pluralistic sites. Our goal here is to deepen the theoretical lenses through which we assess such spaces as community-based educational sites, offering ethnographic data drawn from two sites situated in urban areas.