Unsettling the Syllabus

Led by Colleen Stockmann

Social justice facilitator, adrienne maree brown, describes an adaptive and relational leadership model–emergent strategy–through nine core principles. For brown, “emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.” The principles of emergent strategy include “less prep, more presence” and “change is constant” which have resonance with equitable teaching practices that make space in the syllabus for nimble plans amidst a rapidly changing world and the needs of a classroom community. In the study of art, less prep can mean more time for slow looking and letting go of a canon that must be covered. Unsettling the syllabus asks us to imagine art beyond objects and how we might apply our understanding of design and aesthetic decisions to other types of entities including the structures of oppression. If we posit redlining as a series of design decisions, for example, we invite visual analysis and archival evidence into the conversation about how structural racism is structured and denaturalize vague concepts and transform them into the lived experiences that they are, as encounters with the built environment, for example. Paolo Freire defines praxis as action and reflection directed at oppressive structures which then help generate critical awareness. In this paper, I offer experiments for facilitating critical awareness through an emergent art historical strategy, including assignment and assessment examples.