Curriculum against the state: Sylvia Wynter, the human, and futures of curriculum studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At stake in contemporary US racial tensions is a struggle over the meaning of being “human.” By drawing on black feminist theories of being human as verb, and minority discourse critiques of humanism, the paper links racialization to apparatuses of humanization that emerge in early modernity including slavery, colonization, capitalism and environmental devastation. This paper takes up Sylvia Wynter’s differentiation between the human and man to examine recent critical public pedagogy projects – especially the public syllabus projects emerging around the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO; the Charleston, SC church bombing; the Idle No More movement in Canada, and the movement to stop the pipeline construction in Standing Rock, ND. The examination attends to how the “human” has been defined as a being with a race, and to how this definition of being “human” operates in the service of white supremacy. What the syllabus projects really requires of us, then, is not a curriculum geared toward the lesson that black and Indigenous citizens are humans too, but a collective grappling with the need for new ways of being human– ones not defined by whiteness, ones that can only be articulated in common.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".