The invisible hand: designing curriculum in the afterward

McKnight, L, Rousell, D, Charteris, J, Thomas, K and Burke, G (2017) The invisible hand: designing curriculum in the afterward. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30 (7). pp. 635-655. ISSN 0951-8398

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Abstract

This paper diffracts a curriculum design workshop via online collaboration of a collective emerging from that event. Through the workshop, involving theory, conceptual art, writing, photography and curriculum planning, and the subsequent sharing of words and images, we move beyond interrogating designs for future subjects to asking how the pedagogical imagination composes both the material and immaterial, the corporeal and incorporeal, within ecologies continually transforming in the process of making. We complicate ‘delivery’ or ‘conduit’ metaphors of education and perceive ‘design’ in co-compositions of human and nonhuman elements, resisting stasis, resisting closure. This workshop paper positions design in the realm of the artist–activist, rather than that of the bureaucrat–technician, and shifts intentionality beyond the invisible and controlling hand of humanism, as curriculum design we might do in the afterwards, rejecting instrumentalism.