– Some irreducible convergence: love, dialogue, confidence, coherence —— is this radical education?

Susannah Haslam with contributions by Araceli Camargo, Charles Pryor, Megha Ralapati, Apex Zero and Lou-Atessa Marcellin.

On carbon, solidarity, and work—towards love, dialogue, confidence, and coherence.

The Open Curriculum is an experimental alternative educational project. It puts love, dialogue, confidence, and coherence to work as observed and experienced qualities and capacities of art and education, toward critical reflection on what carbon literacy for arts workers means in the context of the SDNAP project and the decarbonisation plan that materialises through it. The curriculum is composed of subjects — carbon, solidarity, and work — offering a set of alternative routes to different forms of carbon literacy: by first considering how to engage with just transition and climate justice, towards actively enacting just transition in discrete arts work contexts.

The curriculum model provides an infrastructure to rework and about which to reimagine our subjects. It proposes a critical sidestep from training manuals and guidelines and understands the imperative to act to be based on genuine and empathic learning, broadly applying what bell hooks calls the love ethic which is based on ‘showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate’.

Curriculum is usually moderated, mediated, often in exchange for cash in a limited time-space window. This open curriculum is an open composition, initiated by Dani Admiss and Susannah Haslam. And it evolves through the encounters of Araceli Camargo, Megha Ralapati, Apex Zero, Charles Pryor, and Lou-Atessa Marcellin in their work as practitioners and thinkers crossing thresholds of study. For SDNAP the Open Curriculum provides a framework for further study anytime and anywhere for shared concerns that operate at the thresholds of carbon, solidarity, and work.

The Primer will be published throughout September and October 2022.