The invisible hand: transversal thinking with new materialism in curriculum design

This proposal invites participation in a design intensive, in which educators bring along an idea for a unit, seminar, lecture, lesson as the basis for a practical and creative workshop merging conceptual art, writing, poetry and curriculum planning, while engaging playfully with New Materialism. In this work we seek to move beyond merely interrogating designs for future subjects, and to embolden our thinking about curriculum, asking questions to explore how the pedagogical imagination works with both the material and immaterial, the corporeal and incorporeal, within ecologies continually transforming in the process of making. Through this, we explore ways to challenge “delivery”, or “conduit” metaphors of education, to see design as “situated” in new ways involving both human and nonhuman elements, resisting stasis, resisting closure. This workshop positions curriculum design in the realm of the artist/activist, rather than that of the bureaucrat/technician and opens up a space for reflection on the processes of making curriculum.
The workshop also therefore seeks to question how knowledge around curriculum is produced, and to document the ways in which our work as educators is part of a continuous becoming, as we ourselves, and our designs, co-emerge. We remember that curriculum design is fundamentally a creative project, always taking form and transforming in relation to what surrounds us, rather residing in documents, which tend to conceal the entanglements around their making. Instead, we embody and live curriculum; it is happening now