Curriculum as colour and curves: a synthesis of black theory, design and creativity realised as critical curriculum writing

This article looks to three inspirational Black women, bell hooks, Stacey McBride-Irby and Patricia Williams, in the pursuit of radical curriculum. While today curriculum is critiqued as racialized, gendered, sexualised and classed, the formats of curriculum documents such as text books, units of work and lesson plans have changed little. These documents are often conceived as linear sequences of steps leading to outcomes, and their voices are distanced and “neutral”. Drawing on a doctoral study of curriculum design in Australia, this article embraces a different approach by opening up a unit of work on girls’ popular culture to hooks’ invocations to teach to transgress, so that curriculum might be experienced as colour and curves, rather than a monochrome route to a pre-determined end point. Through this, along with hooks, I invite teachers to live pedagogy, rather than to deliver it.

Unsettling creativity: intercultural spaces, study abroad and internationlization beyond the curriculum

This chapter argues that short-term student Study Tours, coupled with preparatory and reflective classes on the home campus, are a more successful way of internationalizing the curriculum and promoting intercultural reflection than the more traditional, longer term student exchange. This is because taking students out of their comfort zones to travel overseas in a study intensive promotes greater ‘productive discomfort’ while supporting this process with classes on the home campus promotes its life changing effects.This chapter draws on two important Study Tours in Creative Writing and Creative and Commercial Entrepreneurship at Deakin University, Australia. The first is an outbound Study Tour to the United States and the second is an inbound Study Tour from India. These Study Tours foreground an important ‘unsettling’ of creativity that impacts on the students’ thinking and writing processes, and prepares them most effectively for their role as global citizens.