I was really pleased to find that we got stuck in to the issues most concerning us in our teaching. I found that it gave me a chance to get other views from quite differently structured courses on the issue I’m currently faced with:
How do we update current curriculum to have a feminist and non-binary critique at its core?
We discussed the balance of locale and global in briefs. I’m intrigued by the balance of the benefit to the individual through inclusion and the benefit to the collective of diversity, and that both are needed for a full benefit to be experienced for the individual or the collective. The problem with a cohort that steps back respectfully when decolonising curriculum and feminism in the curriculum are addressed, is that it places the burden of work on the students who have lived experience. It also prompts a disengagement from the content covered by those without lived experience of the issues discussed. I’ve been tasked with consulting with Course Leaders on 2 BA and 2 MA courses to update the course handbooks, with an aim to directly prompt active delivery by tutors of intersectional feminism within the curriculum. Quite a big task, so I approached it by considering it as a beginning of incremental improvements, which will benefit from many minds and many lived experiences having input, not just my own. I created a suggestion box online for all staff to contribute, there were disappointingly not many contributions but it was important that a consultation method was approached.
Update: reflecting on this process, the collaborative approach worked well, by meeting with Course Leaders and working through it together in a meeting. It’s an incremental process, and I’ve gone into more detail on this in my case study.
This discussion reminded me that in Sound and Music, we work with the invisible, and so it is hard to evidence many things. For example, we have to show occupancy and the studio spaces being populated, however the subject area is so wide within Sound and Music compared to a specialised programme in graphic design, for example, within Sound and Music we encompass many disciplines within each course. This means the evidencing of physical proof is essentially tied to the invisible methods of working, leaving many instances of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole when it comes to the minutiae of negotiation of the immaterial within material needs. Working with the immaterial require studio space and a wide range of teaching and technical support, with any material final product of outcomes being occasional and related to student choices in disciplines and format. Salomé Voegelin says:
“The eye makes out the trace, the blurred outline of the motion that hearing reflects upon and unfolds in its mobile particularity. Consequently, nouns are scarcely present in their language. The only ones I did hear while there were abstract ones, such as faith, doubt, fear, happiness, etc. There are also, as a result, no definite and indefinite articles, no “an” and “the”, and no pronouns either; even the infinitive is rarely used, as it is considered the freewheeling, unethical part of doing that neither does nor is, but is action suspended, hanging about without the commitment to participate.
Without nouns and infinitives nothing is in stasis, but is always what it does, different all the time. The subject too is a verb: I myself am not still, but a fluent substance. My self is a shape-shifting thing, a vague thinging that attains definition through its own sound that as words seek the coincidence of the “sound image” to reflect me and you in the same moment. “
This invisibility, the eye being unable to make out the traces of the outcomes in Sound and Music, is an indication of the impact of invisible outcomes for the female, non-binary and trans students and staff working with Sound and Music. Perhaps this is why the needs for more integration of feminism in the curriculum has been asked for by students, to make visible those who are at risk of exclusion, in an area that already risks marginalisation through the very medium, and the dominant visual areas it sits within.