This week, we wondered about how curricular ‘provocations’ might re-frame our dilemmas as sites of creative, critical analysis and possibility. We talked about moments of excitement and resistance, coming in and out of more theoretical and more practical spaces, and the challenge of holding those two spaces alongside one another, as they always, already are.  We grappled, individually, with the ethics of doing work outside of more constraining spaces, fueling our philosophical desires, and the responsibility of doing that critical work in more constraining, ‘practical’ spaces. Some shared that this space helps them to pause, and to slow down, as we try to stay with the ideas and the tensions, and some shared their efforts to resist a relationship to knowledge based in a desire for mastery. We talked about tinkering - about fathers who tinkered with cars and students who ‘tinker’ through an assignment instead of following directions. Chef’s Table: BBQ series and Seymore Papert’s Mindstorms came up, which led to Eleanor Duckworth’s The Having of Wonderful Ideas, and a story about learning how to learn through experience and observation by observing the moon and teaching oneself how to quilt. We wished it was more common for curricula to be oriented to more open outcomes, or more openness to multiple ways of arriving at an outcome (such as the BBQ, the meal), came up. Brian Eno’s “oblique strategies” - a deck of propositions might be an example.

Raquel and I then shared a card-based curriculum we’ve been working on over the summer. The curriculum came out of conversations at Curriculum Lab in the spring, in the beginning of the pandemic, about changing relationships to public spaces. You can read a bit more about that project and the prompts folks are invited to play with before our next meeting over at the Padlet (search for the post: Intimate Publics: A Card-Based Curriculum for Creative Inquiry, if it’s not near the top of the board).