Cracks in the Curriculum: Countless Ways of Knowing

Artist Barby Asante invited educators to come together to think about how to open up conversations about race and racism in the classroom.

How do we as educators develop discursive and creative opportunities to support understanding about why Black Lives Matter? How can we create safe spaces for students from POC backgrounds to feel confident enough to speak their experiences, verbally or creatively?

Using the mixtape as a method, Barby invited participants to source online images, news stories and videos, in order to generate multi-layered narratives. Through collecting and curating digital material, participants explored truth and fiction, creating space for POC and Black experiences and histories, and exploring different notions of cultural production.

Cracks in the Curriculum aims to bring artists and educators together to discuss ways of bringing pressing social issues into the classroom. This workshop ran in parallel to Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions. Taking place in both the exhibition and studio, the workshop comprised readings, critical discussion and experimental digital collage. Cracks in the Curriculum: Countless Ways of Knowing was devised for anyone who works with children or young people and wants to join an active discussion about issues of race and racism in the classroom.

Barby Asante

Barby Asante is a London based artist, curator and educator who’s work explores space, place and identity. The drive of her work is to create spaces for dialogue, collective thinking, ritual and re-enactment. Using archival material in the broadest sense, she is interested in breaking down the language of archive, not to insert or present alternatives to dominant narratives but to interrupt, interrogate and explore the effects and possibilities of the unheard and the missing. Recent projects include As Always a Painful Declaration of Independence. For Ama. For Aba. For Charlotte and Adjoa an ongoing project that performatively collects stories of Women of Colour, of which a current iteration is showing in the Diaspora Pavilion, Venice and Run Through a collaboration with Architect Gian Givanni currently on show in Who’s Urban Appropriation is This? Curated by Metro 54 at TENT, Rotterdam. She is also part of agency for agency, previously working in collaboration with Serpentine Youth Forum with students at Westminster Academy.

Curated by:

Alex Thorp, Curator, Education

Jemma Egan, Assistant Curator, Education

Joanna Slusarczyk, Assistant Curator, Education