The Kwas: Scraps as Speculative Social Studies for Teachers’ Preparation

• In Event: Theorizing Social Studies Education from Below: Civic Knowledge, Praxis, and Possibility from Los de Abajo

Abstract

Preparing social studies teachers typically involves familiarizing candidates with disciplinary lenses—history, government/civics, geography, and economics—through curated readings, teaching enactments, and clinical experience. We invite candidates to observe classrooms and lived experiences as sites that elicit disciplinary knowledge, encouraging them to formalize the familiar with their own students.

Objectives
This paper proposes something different: the kwas—a Saint Lucian expression for scraps and remnants—as both curricular method and metaphor for speculative social studies inquiry in contexts shaped by crisis. Drawing on Black ecological thought (Roane & Hosbey, 2019), Caribbean womanist praxis (Medwinter & Rozario, 2021), and critical Black curriculum studies (Ohito & Coles, 2021), I examine what it means to teach and theorize from what remains.
The objectives are twofold: first, to theorize a curriculum method rooted in Caribbean survival and the everyday pedagogies of Black women; and second, to contribute to place-based, culturally rooted approaches to social studies curriculum in a rapidly deteriorating political climate. The kwas offers a speculative approach to facilitating social studies education that privileges intuition, creative reassembly, and vernacular knowledge over coherence, coverage, or mastery.

Method and Findings
This inquiry unfolds through a ceremonial act: burning a climate vulnerability report issued for Soufrière, Saint Lucia. The report, emblematic of technocratic responses to Caribbean ecological precarity, becomes data through its destruction. Scraps that resist combustion—words like Hurricane, infrastructure, these hills—are treated as curricular matter and read alongside Caribbean speculative climate fiction.

My work with these remnants facilitates a call and response between official knowledge for climate survival and the survival strategies of Caribbean women, like my grandmother's practice of working with the kwas to stretch meals and soap. The scraps become an analogue for how teachers in under-resourced settings might make curricula “scrappily” through vernacular knowledge.

Implications
Teaching “scrappily” emerges as a form of refusal—against the disposability of people, communities, knowledges, and places beneath oppressive regimes. Just as the climate crisis I focus on demands for creative survival strategies from what remains, the current political disaster and democratic backslide require teachers to figure out how to teach social studies concepts amid increased surveillance, curriculum restrictions, and resource scarcity. Both crises demand speculative approaches that honor what has been discarded or deemed illegitimate.

Significance
By offering the kwas as method and metaphor, this paper contributes to critical Black curriculum studies through a Black transnational perspective on social studies education. It joins scholarship that considers how curriculum might emerge not from abundance but from what is left behind, fostering more integrated forms of social studies instruction: materially grounded, spiritually resonant, and intellectually insurgent. The kwas provides additional language for naming how we have always made much with the scraps—and how we might continue to do so in times of crisis.

Author

• Danielle Charlemagne, University of Georgia