Ethical Curricula in Art and Design

This paper shares three aspects of my recent engagement with curriculum design: writing the Course Designer materials, devising a Curriculum Design Unit and repurposing this Unit into Curriculum Design workshops on Reapproval and Validation. The curriculum will be described as product, process and praxis and I will critique Habermas’s theory of knowledge-interests (technical, practical and emancipatory curricula) as a modernist ‘colonial’ mode of institutionalism. To replace this, the paper will emphasise informal aspects of curricula, especially in an Art and Design context, where principles such as space, flexibility, responsiveness, complexity, contribution validation and negotiated co-design become central rather than peripheral.