Introduction
Located in the American Cultures Center, our hub supports teaching fellows enrolled in the Creative Discovery program – as well as P-16 educators everywhere. It is an evolving and collaborative resource for educators who are committed to collective liberation and seeking to reflect this commitment in their pedagogical practice. Here, you will find resources to critically engage your own pedagogy, while being in dialogue and community with other educators.
An Introduction to Creative Discovery
Creative Discovery describes a liberatory practice and process of disinterring the self from its situation. We support accessible, process-oriented project design and constraint-based storytelling through co-constructive learning environments and anti-racist tactics. Our curriculum will help you navigate three aspects of the teaching process—pedagogy, technology, and affectivity.
The Creative Discovery Fellows program operates from several interrelated premises:
- Structural Inequity
- Institutional Value
- Representation Matters
- Technology Beyond Determinism (TBD)
Structural Inequity
Institutional Value
Education centers on estimations of value. As much as we teachers would like to think of our courses as autonomous centers for active learning, they are formed and informed by institutional protocols, of which value is one. That is, our radical, liberatory curriculum still falls under institutional frameworks for value. Historically, value has been calculated by so-called merit-based frameworks; these practices, however, offer underdeveloped and severely limited estimations, which some critics have described as an inequitable, disingenuous, racist, white supremacist.
Representation Matters
Representation is a situated (i.e., positioned) act that involves the speaker, spoken for, spoken about; it reconstitutes power. Stories are one form of representation. Stories are situated (and not neutral). Not everyone gets to tell stories. Not everyone has control over the stories told about them (or their communities). Not everyone’s experiences are validated by course content; some are actively threatened, antagonized, and unsettled. How we tell stories can be a liberatory process.
Technology Beyond Determinism (TBD)
Technology helps us to tell stories while changing the way we do so. Technology is more than just a tool – it is a system, a set of practices (i.e., techniques), and technical devices (i.e., the tool aspect). The relationship of technology to humanity is beyond utopic and dystopic narratives, it is co-extensive: over time, each reconstitutes itself in relation to the other. Technology is neither good, bad, nor neutral, it is through the design and application of technology that these three terms gain meaning.
