From Currere to Ambire: An Ambient Curriculum

Abstract

This article follows one elementary school teacher navigating the challenges to her curricular commitments posed by the coronavirus pandemic in a major city. I explore what happens when she engages with Ellen Reid’s SOUNDWALK, a GPS-enabled piece of sound art, to offer audiences with access to Central Park an opportunity to listen to orchestral music while maintaining social distancing. I extend Lauren Berlant’s theory of “ambient citizenship”—a way of thinking about political belonging in ordinary scenes at the intersection of sound, movement, and affect—to consider how an ambient curriculum opens up new ways of understanding knowledge, identity, and possibility. I argue that SOUNDWALK made heard an ambient curriculum that already existed—in ambulance alarms, eerie city and school silences, Zoom feedback, and feeling unheard—and, for a moment at least, dislodged the ‘stuckness’ of going on amid it all