A series of engagements with place, emotion, memory, and the senses over the fall are flowing into exciting design work and experiences our Fellows lead us in this spring. As we start off the semester, we’re returning to curriculum rationales — our aims, values, and beliefs about teaching and learning — which has already led to fascinating discussions about our relationship to knowledge, mastery, and educational futures. We have two much-anticipated talks coming up, as Prof. Sandra Schmidt leads us in thinking about how spatiality manifests in our work in February, and we host a book launch for Prof Dani Friedrich and co-authors’ new release Pop Culture and Education: Assemble! in March. Each week, Fellows will lead us in curricular provocations related to their practices and our ongoing conversations at Lab. All of this will culminate in a symposium in April, where Fellows will share their curricular projects. I’m looking forward to this as a sort of interactive collage of our collective thinking at Lab!
The small groups I joined in the past couple weeks have had really interesting conversations about mastery. We’ve probed the value in a skill one has refined that enables creative action; and the violence in a relationship of possession, accumulation, and control. We considered other words for mastery: a hunch, gut, intuition. What the conversation was trying to get at, for me, is a deep perceptual attunement to complexity and the potential in a situation. It’s related to the ways in which we’ve already been participating in the design of curriculum together, and now we get more explicit about the moves we’ve been making and where other micro-experiments in curriculum theory and design might lead.
Hope to see you on Thursdays!
