Teaching the Harlem Renaissance in the 21st Century

Designed for teachers and community educators, this resource presents student-centered curricula for grades 6-12. Each of the nine modules uses critical inquiry approaches to encourage students’ examination of the materiality of different texts and media as the means for exploring and synthesizing content to arrive at their own new understandings of the Harlem Renaissance. Teaching the Harlem Renaissance in the 21st Century accompanied the Wallach Art Gallery exhibition, Uptown Triennial 2020 (on view September 24, 2020–February 28, 2021). The resource is the result of a partnership with the Wallach Art Gallery, the Double Discovery Center, and Institute for Urban and Minority Education at Columbia University

Sense-Methods: Cultivating Intuition in the Face of Uncertain Futures

At the start of the pandemic in 2020, through 2021, a group of curriculum designers met weekly to consider how they might respond to the ruptures the pandemic wrought to their curricular practices and what they needed from curriculum in the face of uncertain futures. They explored these questions through a variety of material, embodied practices—including a traveling box of curricular materials and habits of checking in with bodily sensations, emotions, and affective objects. I approach these practices as “sense-methods”, drawing on Elizabeth Freeman’s theory of how the body’s sense of time can be used as a technology for social cohesion—particularly forged against dominant temporalities—or control. Sense-methods make felt an affective, relational experience of temporality that is neither the uniform clock time, which orders so much of formal curricular documents nor the linear arc of progress that prevailed in public health discourses. I demonstrate how such sense-methods cultivate “intuition”, drawing on Lauren Berlant’s and Erin Manning’s Bergsonian use of that term. Intuition organizes such affective responses to the world: knowledge that lives amid the interface of the body meeting the social, material world. By considering how this group of curriculum theorists and designers marked and made time in ways counter to the dominant timelines of the pandemic and educational development, I argue that curriculum can prioritize such sensuous epistemologies. A curriculum concerned with how time makes itself felt finds wormholes—vulnerable, uncertain, and speculative—to other worlds

Senseable Curriculum: Artful Practices for Curriculum Theory and Design

Over the course of the Coronavirus pandemic, works of art explored social isolation, abolition, and climate crisis. The pandemic had ruptured normative curricular practices in schools and learning discourses focused on minimizing those interruptions. Meanwhile, works such as Ellen Reid’s SOUNDWALK, Kamau Ware’s Fighting Dark, and Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest crafted relationships to knowledge through site-specific sounds, familiar materials, and sensory experiences of their environments. A group of curriculum designers, researchers, and educators, including the author of this study, affiliated with a university-based Curriculum Lab engaged with these artworks, while processing the pandemic’s effects on their own curricular practices. Situated within the Lab, this project used ethnographic and speculative methods to research how the artworks’ aesthetic and sensory strategies activated curricular contact zones and contributed to artful practices for curriculum theory and design. This study built on the work of critical curriculum scholarship which has demonstrated that significant forms of knowledge and belonging are produced through informal and null curriculum, and outside of schools entirely. Drawing on aesthetics, affect, and vital materialisms, this study theorized ambient curriculum: a surround through which any variety of onto-epistemological practices might cohere into relationships of knowing and becoming. At the same time, this study recognized that formal curriculum exerts a large influence on the daily lives of teachers and students, and that there are educators searching for forms of curriculum more aligned to their commitments to social and ecological justice; beliefs about the complexity of knowledge and learning; and approach to design as a creative process. This project considers the implications of such creative processes for curriculum design as a nomadic practice and curriculum designers as nomadic becomings, making and made by their creations