By Stephen Thomas and Ellen Moll

At a recent presentation for the Journal of Curriculum Theory conference¹, we introduced a novel approach to curriculum visualization—one that centers reflection, community-building, and enjoyment in curriculum development work.  This approach is distinct from other visualization processes which serve different, if perhaps worthwhile, functions, that some educators tend to associate with top-down or even ‘conformist’ approaches. We invited participants to explore their course curricula through mapping onto three-dimensional, manipulable, folded paper forms. This analog, hands-on experience provided participants with an out-of-the-box way to reflect on their courses in new ways. 

Why Folded Paper for Curriculum Visualization?

These folded paper models, and our approach to using them, have several benefits for curriculum visualization. One is that this approach is analog and literally hands-on and centers the experience of wonder. We have collaborated previously on how to enhance wonder in pedagogy and curriculum, including how to transform backward design by starting with experiences of wonder instead of traditional outcomes.² We have found that centering wonder also opens up spaces to rethink agencies; with our approach to using folded paper models, the educator decides which curricular elements to focus on, which is another benefit. Most of all, in educator development, we want to provide an enjoyable experience – we want educators to experience whimsy and discovery, to feel that curriculum visualization can be not only creative but also joyful and rejuvenating and even playful. There is magic, metaphorically speaking, to teaching and learning, and we shouldn’t ignore the power of that. 

We also both come to this project with a long history of educator development work, and we have been privileged to work with so many highly reflective and expert teachers who have actively participated in curriculum and educator development work for years or even decades. For both new educators and those with already superb reflection practices, these paper models offer a new way of looking at their courses and their students’ experiences in those courses. This hands-on, tactile method allows educators to visualize the many possible models, metaphors, and connections within their courses. It pushes them to move beyond conventional curriculum maps and see their courses in a new light—exploring internal and external relationships, methodologies, and pedagogies in a more organic and creative way.

Another key strength of this approach and of the paper artifacts is the clarity that curriculum visualization, and indeed curriculum itself, is not only a one-size-fits-all, “checkbox” process. The activities innately demonstrate that any curriculum has multiple possible models, metaphors, and maps. Importantly, the approach emphasizes community-building as a core objective, creating space for educators to share and discuss their curriculum ideas in novel ways. Through this process, they can engage in curriculum visualization that centers collaboration/commonalities in ways that celebrate rather than dampen individual creativity in curricular thinking.

A Varied Audience, A Shared Experience

The audience for this presentation included K-12 teachers, higher education faculty, industry professionals, and theorists. While some participants—particularly those who weren’t actively teaching—were unsure how to engage with the paper models, many others were excited by the tangible artifacts. As part of the presentation, we asked them to write elements of their course curriculum on a paper model that resembled a door but with additional 3-dimensional flaps or panels. The audience particularly liked the idea of using the door-like model to symbolize access or revelation in their courses. 

One challenge we have in introducing these nontraditional approaches is how much guidance to give: less guidance might mean more innovative approaches and insights, but it also might mean more frustration and confusion for participantsAny confusion was easily addressed by going around the room to answer questions from individuals, but the question of how many constraints or instructions to use is a question of both practical and theoretical interest: can more constraints or instructions actually enhance agency and creativity? 

Artistic and intellectual traditions such as surrealism, Oulipo, and others suggest that they can and do. For example,  poet Gabriela Denise Frank, speaking of the artistic movement Oulipo, writes that “[C]onstraints are outstretched hands, offering a place to begin. They interrupt one’s habits and tics, helping to surface the strange.”³ Composer Igor Stravinsky notes,“Well, in art as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation.”⁴  While we are not particularly aiming to connect this work to these particular artists, the use of constraints to generate creativity is clearly part of many traditions and practices. In fact, these traditions indirectly have contributed to our workshop and toolbox, as well as our approach more generally: it is precisely the constraints of the physical form of the paper model – its shapes, angles, limits, and bends – that guide the curriculum visualization process, and thereby produce new directions for curricular reflection.  

A Feminist Technoscience Lens

We are excited about thinking through this work through a feminist technoscience framework, particularly Katie King’s ideas about writing technologies and their connections to epistemological practices and material-historical contexts. King investigates the social and ethical entanglements with acts of fixing or solidifying language in a technology. Writing technologies shape what people choose to think about and how they think about those things; these technologies shape how communities form and how they set boundaries for those communities. King, in lectures, mentions that a scroll and a codex offer different possibilities for comparing sentences within a textual artifact vs. across different textual artifacts. In her book Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell⁵ and her earlier Theory in Its Feminist Travels: Conversations in US Women’s Movements⁶, for example, King examines epistolary networks, museum re-enactments, knots and textiles, transmedia narratives and fandom, and other topics to elucidate the vast potential of theorizing writing technologies to address urgent questions related to power, knowledge, and resistance. Inspired by this work, we are interested in joining in conversation with others who are thinking about how writing technologies might, in practice, work to enhance educator agency, creativity, and community-building in curriculum development.

Scaling Up

Looking ahead, we hope to scale this project by improving the production model of our toolkits, which currently include a paper binder with four different paper models and a golf pencil. We’re exploring more economical ways to produce these kits and identifying events and communities where educators can come together to explore these reflective practices. Ultimately, we envision this project as a way to reclaim curriculum development as both an art and a craft—as well as a space where individuality, wonder, and collaboration are promoted. As we expand these methods, we hope to engage educators in experiences to explore curriculum as a rich, multi-dimensional practice that celebrates complexity and resists simplification, allowing them to connect more deeply with both their teaching, colleagues, and students.

References:

1. Moll, E., and S. R. Thomas. “Structure, Wonder, and Craft: Curricular Imagination and Reflective Practice with Three-Dimensional Paper Artifacts.” Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice, 15 Mar. 2024, Bergamo. Conference Presentation.
2. Moll, E., and S. R. Thomas. “Interdisciplinarities of Wonder: Science-Humanities Integration and the Future of Universities.” 44th Annual Association of Interdisciplinary Studies Conference: Wicked Problems, 2022. Conference Presentation.
3. Frank, G.D. “Grave Unseriousness: Experimenting with Oulipo Constraints.” Poetry Foundation, Publication Date, www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/162152/grave-unseriousness-experimenting-with-oulipo-constraints. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.
4. Stravinsky, Igor. “Well, in art as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation.” Goodreads, n.d., www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/8280.Igor_Stravinsky. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.
5. King, Katie. Networked reenactments: Stories transdisciplinary knowledges tell. Duke University Press, 2012.
6. King, Katie. Theory in its feminist travels: Conversations in US women’s movements. Indiana University Press, 1994.