Sit and Listen

Abstract

I know Walter as a musician, as an adventurous scholar and voracious reader, as an exuberant teacher of children. Above all, I know him as a thrillingly promiscuous mixer and cutter, whose “big ears” take him to all the corners of the echoscape our foremothers and fathers have defined for us as curriculum theory.  Maybe that sense of history is why—when invited to respond to Sonic Curriculum’sfocus on the “everything else” of sensory experience, that overflows common-sense notions of curriculum—my first association was a description of overwhelm.  Because Walter and I have both been teachers of social foundations of education. That slippery and elastic course (where it still survives in the teacher ed sequence, that is), tasked with giving future teachers the “everything else” of school. The history of bias and institutionalized racism; the way that the caste system of the “RWI” (“Ridiculously White Institution” —his term) continues to feel normal, to make us its unwitting instrument of perpetuation unless we make constant, daily choices to interrupt it.