When the Walls Talk: A Counterstory for Curriculum Studies

• In Event: 75.015 - Advocacy and Activism in Curriculum Studies: Reconceptualizing the Field

Abstract

Sometimes it is difficult to understand the significance or the impact of an idea, an institution, a place, or a complicated conversation until that thing is no more. Deep understanding is often a matter of behind sight; it is, in other words, an act of reflecting on what was. And that is typically the way these things go particularly in academic work. I am interested, however, in how we might engage in deep understandings of significance and impact before absence and in the midst of the moment. For this I turn to the work of counterstorytelling through the speculative realm, where we might ponder the possibilities by imagining what in the present moment seems impossible. In the likes of George Orwell’s 1984, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and Derrick Bell’s “Space Traders”, “When the Walls Talk” reaches for deep understanding of the present moment by luring readers into other places, other times, and other worlds. Drawing on notions of place, collective memory, and rhetoric as strategy, “When the Walls Talk” imagines a world absent of the “complicated conversation” that is curriculum studies.
Shadow Shariff, a former public school teacher and curriculum studies professors, finds herself out of work, out of a home and quite nearly out of hope until she begins shacking in a long abandoned and slowly crumbling school building in Detroit’s Cass Corridor. Cass Technical High School had once been the best of the best among Detroit Public Schools—eight floors and 8,000 teenagers. Built in 1907, the historic school was forced to close its doors in 2057, for no reason other than, that public schools were quickly becoming relics of a long forgotten democracy. Public places were being privatized or simply destroyed if they did not fit neatly into the plans of the buyer. Although the push toward privatization brought us much more efficiently run places, there were few if any places where people could engage in critical thinking and open dialogue, both were tightly scripted—disciplined by the newly emerging nature of places as owned and operated rather than inhabited or imbued with identities past and present. Everything was at stake in a time when few things, however, seemed out of place. Money, progress, orderliness, efficiency, accountability and exclusion embedded in discourses of inclusion define the rhetorical landscape upon which Shadow tries to disrupt the humdrum of everyday things and carve out a place of disruption, a place of possibility, a revolutionary place, a place where things like community and justice, and thinking, and meaningful conversation and being alive still matter. One day she wonders into the abandoned building looking for shelter from the brutal cold and looking for a place where she could think, think thoughts that were not being tracked on computers or by computers, much to her surprise she finds much more than a warm place to think. Shadow finds herself in the midst of a “complicated conversation” with the ghostly inhabitants of Cass Technical High School.

Author

• Denise M. Taliaferro Baszile, Miami University