Abstract
Loughlin, Maranda, The Worldly Texts of After-School Programs: New Perspectives in Pedagogy. Master of Arts in English, May 2020, Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska.
My thesis theorizes the after-school environment of middle schoolers as a borderland. It is a case for the richness of time found between the hours of 3pm and 6pm. This three-hour space can function for the worlding of curriculum, bringing the exterior world outside a school, into the classrooms of students. This three-hour space can answer the questions of students outside the standardized core subjects. And here, in this three-hour time frame, students do ask questions that are outside the curriculum. Without answering their questions there are holes. Students seek to know about feminism, violence, incarceration, and identity. This is heard in the questions they ask, and it is seen in the way they move as individuals throughout the school day. Students are not outside of reality, or the “real world.” They move within it. When they ask about topics outside of core school subjects, it is because they genuinely seek correct information and multiple opinions. They want the information to be able to communicate about the topics surrounding them.
This project deconstructs theory in a way that brings language to students instead of asking them to cipher through academic riddles for answers. After-school programs are a borderland of identities, ages, and information. There is no “normal” or standardization to after-school programming. This space is flexible in what it can teach. In borderlands, knowledge grows, and it can be an inclusive space for students in all their lived realities.
In these chapters, I write to world curriculum, not during the school day, but after it, as students transition from bell systems to the borderland. My methodology is based in the works of theorists Gloria Anzaldúa, Rob Wilson, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward Said, and Stanley E. Fish to center the space of after-school programming as an interpretive community made up of bodies holding onto the individual textbooks of themselves and moving through a borderland as a cohesive heterogeneous group. Worlding curriculum seeks to grab onto perspectives and conversations outside the nation’s standard of education, and after-school programs have access to this worlding.
These chapters world the curriculum in three parts. In teaching middle school students through a lens of transnational and intersectional feminism I employ the works of Uma Narayan, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Jhumpa Lahiri, bell hooks, Gayatri Gopinath, Roxanne Gay, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Rosi Braidotti, Nina Chanel Abney and Gloria Steinem. With these theorists, novelists, artists, and activists in mind, mentors in Omaha’s community aid in teaching the students about feminism and racism on both local and world scales with the intent of dismantling the idea of the other. When speaking to teaching about incarceration, Michelle Alexander, the American Civil Liberties Union, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and the ideas and voices of men who are currently incarcerated are weaved together in consideration of why it is important to be teaching about the interior experiences of incarceration versus the contrived beliefs. The intent is to humanize incarceration in a middle schooler’s eyes, by asking the people who are incarcerated to be the teachers. In writing about teaching the wideness of identity, I work with pieces written by Stacey Waite, Rebecca Solnit, Mary Pipher, Ijeoma Oluo, Nikki Giovanni, hooks, Gopinath, Yvette Chavez, and Anzaldúa to build classrooms that allow for the fluidness and fixed pieces of identity for both teachers and students. In this piece, I build a curriculum that uses poetry as a tool for self-examination.
It is easy for the three hours between 3pm and 6pm to flicker on by without notice. But this space, free of standardization is the space to answer questions from students about incarceration, feminism, and identity, and it can be done so with community, teachers, and activities. My hope is that the borderlands of after-school programs can be considered a space for the worlding of curriculum and that this space can wedge itself into a middle schooler’s education. These pre-teens and teenagers are already grappling with the world because they are not distant from it, they are members of it. Worlding curriculum in interpretive communities like after-school programs can be treated like identity itself, expansive, fluid, germinal, messy, and without borders because this is where greater textual knowledge lies.