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?