Teaching

 Curriculum could be seen as movement or action that is about not knowing or about intuition. This is why an art studio, laboratory, or going outside are interesting learning situations. In a laboratory you may be exploring or testing a hypothesis. In the art studio you may be making an artistic inquiry where you don’t know what the end result might be. When you go outside the experience is full of unexpected possibilities. As teachers we may deliberately try to set up opportunities for our students that may involve situations that deliberately engage with complex, unpredictable outcomes and that can be altered if other opportunities arise. 

 Curriculum might be an inner vision, the seed of an idea, or just a hunch of possibility. Curriculum can also be a way to express ideas about teaching and what teaching does or what teaching might aspire to do, or a way to express ideas about how we know what we know. Curriculum can be a way to argue for why we might want to study something like collage or drawing in the first place. 

The guiding insight of deconstruction is that every structure (including curriculum), that organizes our experiences is put together and maintained by acts of exclusion. Some ways that deconstruction can be applied include, curriculum as a way to problematize an art text, to question, to interrupt our taken for granted awareness, to contextualize and challenge assumptions, to locate the art in history or in another history, to trouble what our ideals about artmaking might exclude. It is important to recognize the limitations and inherent contradictions in the ideas that guide our actions, the cultural norms we take for granted, including the cultures of teaching and schooling, and to creatively reconstruct these ideas in new ways. 

outside in a pandemic

the color of skin

rock canyon