Upcoming issues of Chimurenga

The Chimurenga Chronicle – a speculative, future-forward newspaper that travels back in time to re-imagine the present.

The next issue of Chimurenga will take the form of a once-off, one-day-only edition of a weekly newspaper the likes of which has never been seen in Africa.

Produced in collaboration with two of Africa’s leading independent publishers, Kenya’s Kwani? and Nigeria’s Cassava Republic, it is both a bold art project and a hugely ambitious publishing venture.

Straddling the space between fact and fiction, the Chimurenga Chronicle will bring together the brightest talents and leading minds of our time – journalists and editors, writers, theorists, photographers, illustrators and artists from around the world – to re-engage the format and to realize how beautiful and important newspapers could be today.

Back-dated to the week May 11-18 2008, it reports on the first week of the so-called xenophobic violence in South Africa, two years ago – and events around the world during this period including politics, analysis, arts, sport, comics, books etc.

This is not only a commemoration. It is also a second chance; an opportunity to provide the depth of reporting and analysis that should have appeared during this period. Our aim is not only to reanimate history – to ask what could have been done – but also to provide a space from which to re-engage the present and re-dream the future.

For queries email: chimurenga@panafrican.co.za

 

 

Chimurenga 15: The Curriculum is Everything

Airport sounds from a distance, blurred, incomprehensible, then suddenly loud and clear. "Flight sixty-nine has been..." Static ... fades into the distance ... "Flight..." Standing to one side of the desk are three men, grinning with joy at their prospective destinations. When I present myself at the desk, the woman says: "You haven't had your education yet."

                   William Burroughs, My Education: A Book of Dreams

Who be teacher, I go let you know...

                    Fela Anikulapo Kuti, "Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense"


The curriculum teaches you what’s going on,
how to think and feel about what’s going on,
what used to go on and what could go on.
It teaches you who to be afraid of and who to aim to conquer.
It teaches you what you can do and what you can’t.
It teaches you how to make people love you and how to sit properly in company.
It teaches you how to see and how to hear.

The curriculum is everything.

The curriculum is everything, and everything is in the curriculum.

It’s hard to design a curriculum without reference to what you went through yourself at school.
Harder still if you’ve also been a teacher.

So, as a starting point, perhaps agree on a few familiar landmarks:
students organised in groups or working alone,
moving from stage to stage in learning processes,
encountering bodies of knowledge and skills that increase their ability to do something, or be something.
All of these landmarks can be demolished;
but they would have to be replaced by others that also function creatively for the student.

Perhaps agree on a few familiar bodies of knowledge and skills:
languages, literatures, visual and musical arts, dance, computer science, carpentry, cookery, mathematics, history, natural sciences.
All of these can be demolished, etc.

Perhaps choose a model of learning structured in terms of the old craft mastery system;
or one defined by values such as spontaneity, happiness, implicate order.
And a model of what is worth knowing and doing, with whom and for whom.

Perhaps name some favourite states of being that the curriculum should aim to make possible:
kindness, bravery, stillness, agility, irony, curiosity...

And think about how the curriculum and the student will find each other: –
face-to-face, skype-to-skype, by sms and jpg, by walking and flying,
through networks and paper, under trees and in shopping malls, in libraries and bedrooms.

In the end, start simply by asking what could the curriculum be –
if it was different from the one that exists now?
if it was designed by the students who have to follow it?
if it was designed by the people who dropped out of school so that they could breathe?

Please send your subjects, your textbooks, your lesson plans, your games, your unexaminable questions, your open-source exercises and all the rest (and queries) to:
chimurenga@panafrican.co.za by Friday 31 July 2009.

 – With thanks to Karen Press and Stacy Hardy