MAPPING THE CIVIC CURRICULUM

Location

We’ll meet at 4pm at NEW INC, at the New Museum, in their Forest conference room. 

Agenda

Paul John, NEW INC’s Head of Community, will join us for our first half-hour to tell us about NEW INC itself as a para-institutional learning community and coaching platform. We’ll consider where NEW INC fits within the broader ecology of alternative education and public study — but in order to that, we’ll have to start mapping that terrain. So, today, I invite each of you to share a short dossier on an NYC alternative school or learning community of your choice. Our goals for this week are as follows: to begin surveying the heterogeneous landscape of alternative schools and public study programs in NYC, extending beyond those we’re featuring in our class; to tap into the knowledge and experience of our colleagues who run schools of their own (🙌🏽); and to give everyone else an opportunity to think critically about a school that matters to them — a historical inspiration, a contemporary muse, a potential model for something you’d like to make. 

An admission: I had hoped to schedule this activity a bit later in our “semester” — after we’d done a few weeks of fieldwork — but our hosts’ schedules required compromise 🙂 So, we’ll instead approach this activity as pre-fieldwork orienteering: we’ll examine some case studies to identify things we should be thinking about and looking for as we begin our exploration — and consider what we might ultimately want to create together.. 

To Prepare for This Week

• Familiarize yourself with NEW INC and Paul John. 
• Now, please read an excerpt from Andy Hines and Eli Meyerhoff, “Alternative Institutions” in Hines, ed., University Keywords (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025): 53-59; stop at “The Jefferson School,” which we’ll be reading about for November 18. 
• Let’s consider other catalogues of pedagogical projects and related programs:
  • Peruse Pioneer Works’ 2016 “Alternative Art School Fair.” 
  • Check out “A School of Schools,” the 2018 Istanbul Design Biennial.
  • Introduce yourself to Princeton’s Radical Pedagogies project, which turned into a beautiful book (2022), which I have, and which I hope to share if I can find it in storage! They used to have a fantastic project website, too, but even the Wayback Machine relic is compromised, sadly. If you’re interested, you can see lots of the book’s graphic material in this video from the book launch.  
  • Check out Re’al Christian and Jeannie Han’s “An Incomplete* Listing of NYC Libraries, Reading Rooms, and Archives” (Vera List Center, 2025) [For some reason, I can’t link directly do the listing’s page; you’ll find it in the second column on the VLC’s publication page. Fun fact: Re’al served on the CRC’s initial advisory board’. 
  • Skim my Arena channel of Para-/Extra-Institutional Schools. It’s a lot; I’m hoping the effect is more “wow, look at all this great stuff!” than overwhelm 🙂
• Now, choose an alternative school or learning community, historical or present, that intrigues you — perhaps because you contribute to it, perhaps because it offers an important historical precedent, perhaps because it serves as a contemporary muse or model for something you’d like to create. If you’re having trouble choosing, you can describe your interests on Zulip and ask for a referral, or you can chat with me! Please contribute a short “research dossier” to our Preliminary Index of Public Study. Some questions to consider: [coming soon]