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?