Education curriculum, the spoken and unspoken rules, language, and the ways education operates are uniquely responsible for creating and perpetuating the inequality that exists in so many aspects of modern human society. This slide deck is very illuminating to me in the way it lays things out. It offers a framework for seeing the different types of responses that generally appear in relation to transforming education and curriculum. I’m deeply grateful to Paul Prinsloo from the University of South Africa for this piece.
In this deck, there was one particular framework that really struck me. Here is the expanded article about Mapping Interpretations of Decolonization in the Context of Higher Education.
And that evolved for me into this graphic that illustrates the different ways that we can impact change. The original comes from an article about decolonization and the image was titled, Social Cartography of General Responses to Modernity’s Violence. I played with the layout and content a bit and found another place where it was labeled as different Theories of Change. This model has been huge for me over the last 6 months, helping me clarify my area of action/contribution. We need people working in all of these areas.
This framing helped me see the subtle difference between creating new systems and reforming the current system. Both require creativity and a fuckton of other skills. Yet it’s been helpful for me to see the subtle difference and better understand why some initiatives experience conflict and tension when it appears there is a shared mission to create something new (yet actually there is a difference in creating new within our outside of the current system). I again welcome feedback, insights, layout thoughts.
Personal Note: In these times when emotions and intensity are so strong, it helps me to calm my nervous system by thinking through the complexity, writing or working on graphics like this. It was a late night last night!
