An Uncertain Curriculum

• In Event: White Study Hall: Collective Investigations and Creative Responses to the Problem of Educational Whiteness

Abstract

The toolkit is full of assurances. It works against the daily vulnerabilities of teaching--not knowing how to respond, the contagious swell of student boredom, disruption, and emotional overflow--to promise competence. Read this set of texts and you will know just what to do; carry out these steps, in this sequence and you will have engineered deep learning; if x comes up, do y.

As a collective of educators, our group has worked to trouble the curricular implications of the toolkit in racial justice education for our students (as pre-service and practicing educators) and for ourselves (as makers, scholars and educators). Academic scholarship has a similar bend towards certainty--the ideology of a comprehensive literature review, the disciplinary geometries of circumscribed expertise. In contrast, our collaborations across video chat, pedagogical spaces, and blogging platform center practices of puzzlement and uncertainty from different professional and racialized positions.

One way we have done this is by sharing and taking up our undergraduate and graduate curriculum with each other. Over the course of several weeks, we each posted course assignments that reference our shared interests in race, space, embodiment, affect and creative practice--cut and pasted from past syllabi into the blog. Then we attempted to do each other’s assignments, posting material collections “based on how [we] see/experience whiteness in personal as well as social/institutional spaces” (Author 1); creating “self-surveys” of the racialized identities of our school spaces, communities, friends, and pop culture interests among others.

In my paper, I explore several of the particular assignments and the affective positioning of doing this work together in this way. This presentation traces the uncertain curriculum of our collaborative assignments--our blending of positions (student, teacher, maker), and the ever-unfinished practices of re-turning, re-making, doubling back to assignments, topics, and memories.

Author

• Victoria G. Restler, Rhode Island College