Instructor Resources

The Creative Discovery Fellows curriculum helps teachers guide students through a storytelling process, which is viewed as a constrained activity: only some get to tell stories, although all are capable; some have no control over how their stories are told; and, pushing even further, some have their life experiences affirmed by stories featured in our classrooms, while others find theirs dismissed, erased, and/or rewritten. 

The educational system isn’t broken. It is built to produce inequity; therefore, no amount of labor can fix it. First disassembly is required.

Education centers on estimations of value. As much as we teachers would like to think of our courses as autonomous centers for active learning, they are formed and informed by institutional protocols, of which value is one. That is, our radical, liberatory curriculum still falls under institutional frameworks for value. Historically, value has been calculated by so-called merit-based frameworks; these practices, however, offer underdeveloped and severely limited estimations, which some critics have described as inequitable, disingenuous, racist, white supremacist.

Representation is a situated (i.e., positioned) act that involves speaker, spoken for, spoken about; it reconstitutes power. Stories are one form of representation. Stories are situated (and not neutral). Not everyone gets to tell stories. Not everyone has control over the stories told about them (or their communities). Not everyone’s experiences are validated by course content; some are actively threatened, antagonized, and unsettled. How we tell stories can be a liberatory process.

Technology helps us to tell stories while changing the way we do so. Technology is more than just a tool – it is a system, a set of practices (i.e., techniques), and technical devices (i.e., the tool aspect). The relationship of technology to humanity is beyond utopic and dystopic narratives, it is co-extensive: over time, each reconstitutes itself in relation to the other. Technology is neither good, bad, nor neutral, it is through the design and application of technology that these three terms gain meaning.