Radical Museology/Radical Pedagogy: Curating Beyond Boundaries
In this born digital project, we use the practices, genres, and logics of exhibition as an organizing framework for communicating a subversive approach to writing pedagogy. We have selected, arranged, interpreted, and juxtaposed artifacts from museums and from the University of Rhode Island (URI) first-year writing curriculum that tell a disjointed and fragmented story about what social justice work is possible in both museums and schools. In keeping with our work to disrupt sedimented writing instruction practices, we cultivate here dis-orientation, dis-census, and dis-obedience as necessary dispositions for unlearning and unmaking hegemony in the classroom. We invite participants to experience these affective dimensions of radical pedagogy and listen to the “noise” as they step into a three-dimensional virtual reality classroom we developed with the open-source platform Artsteps. As a corollary to the VR exhibition, which is available at https://www.artsteps.com/view/5d795b7124396e1a5c2cfd0b, this exhibition catalogue further contextualizes and interprets the artifacts, theorizing the productive juxtaposition of radical museology and radical pedagogy.
In this born digital project, we use the practices, genres, and logics of exhibition as an organizing framework for communicating a subversive approach to writing pedagogy. We have selected, arranged, interpreted, and juxtaposed artifacts from museums and from the University of Rhode Island (URI) first-year writing curriculum that tell a disjointed and fragmented story about what social justice work is possible in both museums and schools. In keeping with our work to disrupt sedimented writing instruction practices, we cultivate here dis-orientation, dis-census, and dis-obedience as necessary dispositions for unlearning and unmaking hegemony in the classroom. We invite participants to experience these affective dimensions of radical pedagogy and listen to the “noise” as they step into a three-dimensional virtual reality classroom we developed with the open-source platform Artsteps. As a corollary to the VR exhibition, which is available at https://www.artsteps.com/view/5d795b7124396e1a5c2cfd0b, this exhibition catalogue further contextualizes and interprets the artifacts, theorizing the productive juxtaposition of radical museology and radical pedagogy.
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Radical Design
Writing instruction has long been about disciplining and punishing students for their failure to meet
outcomes and expectations, and nowhere is this exercise of power more prevalent than in first-year writing.
This dogmatic view is exercised in the curricular and assessment structures that West-Puckett began to
undermine while serving as a lecturer at her previous university. In 2017, she assumed the role of First Year
Writing director at URI, bringing with her a host of alternative grading paradigms and experience designing
open-ended writing and learning curricula. West-Puckett joined forces with Shepley, and together they
tackled the challenges of developing a curriculum that would meet the needs of URI students, as well as
figuring out how these unconventional approaches would scale. After a two-semester pilot, West-Puckett
and Shepley worked with the graduate teaching assistants and full- and part-time department faculty, as
well as high school faculty in the concurrent enrollment program, to implement a full rollout of the new
curriculum in fall 2019, comprising approximately 35 sections.
Similar to the radical museology presented here, URI’s Writing to Inform and Explain (WRT 104) curriculum
is designed like an exhibition with various pathways, which enable greatest freedom and experimentation
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