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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Over the past two years, we’ve worked to build understanding of and support for this radical project
among students, faculty in our department and beyond, deans and associate deans, as well as university
college administrators and advisors. Depending on the constituency, we’ve highlighted different facets
of the course design. While coalition building is never easy or efficient, this process is particularly slow
because many people need time to experience the shock of these juxtapositions, unfreeze, and open up
to the possibility of doing first-year writing in such a different way. Our experiences underscore the need
for program administrators to plan for relationship building and the affective responses that accompany
pedagogical and programmatic reform.
This work points to the democratic power of radical pedagogy as teachers and students have become
organizers/interpreters/catalysts/caretakers of the classroom space and our FYW commons. In this way,
both students and faculty are taking on curatorial roles as they select and assemble new technologies,
objects, artifacts, and experiences in our ever-unfinished programmatic “gallery.” These curators, learners,
and educators are transgressing the institutional boundaries that fix meaning, bodies, and objects by
relaxing their grip on hegemonic cultural practices and allowing meaning to emerge and re-emerge in
radical and unpredictable ways.
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