Today, we finalized our plans to visit the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery. While the museum traces the legacy of slavery and mass incarceration, the memorial memorializes African Americans lynched. These systems of oppression and ritualistic acts of violence left an impression on the place. Rather than repress or suppress these experiences, the museum and the memorial attempt to draw the visitor's attention to the difficult past. According to Derrida (1996), "what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way" (p. 18). During our time in Montgomery, we plan to collaboratively design a curriculum to supplement the museum and memorial.
We also continued planning the new curriculum design course. We finalized a general outline for that four-day course. The first day will focus on an overview of curriculum, offering students an option between basic and advanced readings. The second day focuses on curriculum as public pedagogy. The third day moves into the curriculum walk, discussing the writings of Springgay's Walking Methodologies (2017), Basso's Wisdom Sits in Places (1996), and Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000). We also talked about including films, Marina Abramovich's performance art, and the Way of Saint James (Camino de Santiago). The Camino de Santiago is a popular walking route that retraces a pilgrimage route across Northern Spain. Rather than haphazard wanderings, the Camino de Santiago is communal and mapped. We were interested in the differences between the solitary walk and the communal walk. How might a collaborator change the experience? How might a map change it? We watched a video based on Abramovich’s The Artist is Present. For two and half months in 2010, Abramovich sat at a lonely table and invited museum goers to join her at the table and share an intense gaze. At one point, a former collaborator, unseen for years, came to visit. We watched a video of a song dedicated to this visit from Uley, Abramovich's former collaborator. On the fourth and final day, we plan to focus on the design and structuring teaching and learning. We also talked about the assignments for the upcoming, online, 1-credit course. There will be two writing assignments, a shared curriculum walk, and a culminating lesson plan. The first assignment is the curriculum statement. What has your experience been with curriculum design or educational events? This assignment gives us a sense of how individuals in the class are thinking about curriculum. We talked about this assignment being written, video, or audio, but we listed under writing assignments. The second writing assignment revolves around blog postings. Specifically, the blog posting revolves around connections to places and walking. The next assignment, the shared curriculum walk, offers students in the course an opportunity to take a walk. While taking the walk, we will ask students to record the walk with multiple representations: map, curation, process, musical scoring, history, smell, taste, sound and wide-awake moments. What were you thinking of on the walk? The final assignment asks students to write a lesson plan for their own context and audience. How might these experiences change the way you think about your curriculum work?
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This week's Black Paint meeting occurred on the Teachers College campus. We talked about the website. Although it is ready to share, there are some changes coming to the website. Specifically, the “People” page and the landing page Padlet prompt. Formerly, the prompt asked visitors to free associate with “black paint.” We were interested in this a few months ago. Now, we’re more interested in what visitors to the website think of curriculum. “What does curriculum mean to you?” Next, we reviewed the curriculum strategy projects from the Advanced Curriculum Design course. The final projects were impressively designed and visually appealing. We started to think about which strategies might pair well together for a course. Each of the strategies will require some modification in order to create a seamless course. We planned to start with four different curriculum strategies: walking, exhibition, (an)archive and difficult knowledge. Then, we discussed the upcoming course offerings. The plan is to transform these curriculum strategies into a one-credit course, which will be offered in Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Summer A 2019 and Summer B 2019. In the long run, we hope to transform these one-credit courses into a 3-credit course in 2019-2020 and possibly write a book about curriculum design during the process.
Given our interest in walking curriculum, Jackie introduced us to a walking tour that she experienced at the old Customs House in Manhattan, which is now the National Museum of the American Indian’s George Gustav Heye Center. At the southernmost end of Manhattan overlooking the port, the Customs House, built in 1907, initially served as a site for the collection of customs duties from the port. The location now houses multiple organizations, including the George Gustav Heye Center, which is dedicated to the exhibition of Native American art and artifacts. It is a strange combination: a Customs House that once fueled expansion now serving as a museum of Native American culture, a monolith that never existed. The walking tour that Jackie described was from Black Gotham. Part of the tour included looking carefully at the ornate sculptures of the building, specifically the marble statues of the Four Continents from Daniel Chester French: Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. The Black Gotham walking tours trace the remnants of the African Diaspora in early New York history. For example, Caesar’s Rebellion charts a path to commemorate a rebellion, referred to at the time as “the Great Negro Plot,” which sought to improve the living conditions for the city's underclass of slaves, indentured servants, and workers. Part of the challenge of designing a walking tour is exposition. How much exposition is necessary? Obviously, it will depend on the participants. Too much exposition and the participants feel like a captive audience subjected to a lecture. Too little exposition and some participants will feel like they “didn’t get their money’s worth.” Fair concerns. The answer seems to hinge on the purpose of the curriculum. Here, Biesta’s (2013) multi-purpose conception of education might help. The curriculum designer and the pedagogue must weigh the competing purposes for the curriculum: qualification, socialization, and subjectification. A walking tour like Caesar’s Rebellion infuses all three of these purposes, but it is a complicated balancing act. How much qualification is needed from a walking tour? How much is expected? |
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