Images, Imagination, and the Construction of a Curriculum in New York City

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum Beyond Policy and Practice: A Symposium on Research in Curriculum for Postqualitative Times

Abstract

How might images (pictorial reproductions of places) we encounter and make help both construct and trouble accepted and/or acceptable images (conceptions, perceptions, impressions) of spaces/places and the explicit and implicit curricula generated by them?
This proposed paper, using de Certeau’s (1988) notion of “tactics” while walking the city and a cultural studies approach to the reading of images (Werner, 2000), focuses on the experience of a group of social studies educators’—student teachers, collaborating teachers, doctoral students, and their instructor (the author) partaking in a graduate summer course at Teachers College—that explored three venues in New York City as curricular and pedagogical spaces. The three venue, all located across from each other on the corner of Fifth venue and 50th St. in Manhattan, included St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Saks Fifth Avenue Department Store, and Rockefeller Center.
Prominent in the exploration of the three venues as curricular and pedagogical spaces—that is, for the paths to knowing they advance and for the ways in which they position bodies to know—was a threefold examination of image: as mental snapshots course participants took as they walked through and among those venues, as conceptions they held of these venues prior to our visit, and as forms of imag(e)ing made explicit as the two were confronted in a critical exploration of what these three venues attempt to teach those visiting them about the world and its people, about how that world does (and should) operate, and about the direction in which those they encounter ought to desire.

The paper examines the staging of knowing and experience in each of the three venues through visual images, spatial arrangements, and architectural configurations as well as the ways in which the narratives each venue conveys, though seemingly quite different, in fact cohere to tell a larger story about America—past, present, and future—as each venue’s narrative interacts with those told within their adjacent venues. The paper focuses on the role of image/imagining in the unfolding of the curricular/pedagogical narratives these venues wish to convey and the ways in which images speak and conflate to form a broader sense of imagination about what is “real” and intelligible about the world and what is possible/impossible within it.

Author

• Avner Segall, Michigan State University