To design a curriculum is, according to the long-held and still dominant protocols of many institutional educational settings, to set down in stone a course to follow: to formalize what knowledge is to be disseminated and to standardize the methods through which that dissemination takes place. Though the Latin root of the word refers to “a course to be run”—that is, involving movement or motion—the notion of the “curriculum” has come to be typically associated with educational fixity. And, over time, the often skewed power dynamics and prevailing historical contexts within which educational models have emerged have become cast in the resin of curricula.

How, then, can curricula be constructed in the age of the Anthropocene that resist the allure of rigid familiarity yet offer grounded, robust strategies for understanding and responding to anthropocenic challenges?

Over nearly a decade, the Anthropocene Curriculum (AC) has “drawn together heterogeneous knowledge practices, inviting academics, artists, and activists from around the world to co-develop curricular experiments that collectively respond to this crisis of the customary.”0.1.1 These experiments—of which the AC Courses format is one such iteration—constitute many different responses to the above question.

This pathway, developed by the AC Team for the inaugural “On Curricula” course, affords us the chance to bring together approaches and research that we see as exemplary outcomes of these experiments. The pathway is not intended to “present” a selection of research objects that merely recap the activities of the AC to date; rather, it aims at identifying those facets that have emerged as being core to these endeavors. The proposal, then, is that these facets should underpin not just the AC project but curricula more generally.

The first of these core aspects concerns the establishing of topological connections. As the first Anthropocene Campus explored in 2014 through the modeling of “wicked problems,”0.1.2 complexity0.1.3 is a more than appropriate term for the Anthropocene. The nonlinear behavior of climatic and biological systems, co-evolution of socioepistemic formations, intricate feedback loops between the material and the mental, ecologizing of economics, and planning of sustainable cities: these interconnections between entities, places, and agencies that shape the Anthropocene at its base level are multiple and multidimensional. Furthermore, complexity itself is a multidimensional problem. It is conditioned by a number of factors, such as scale, context, and discipline. A species in one habitat plays a different role in other habitats;0.1.4 the opposition to a pipeline in one community will be understood differently by a profit-driven firm;0.1.5 an art practice might be seen as not outspoken enough in one social milieu but invaluable to another that is beset by authoritarian censorship. Context is key. Hence, The Shape of a Practice program, which took place in the fall of 2020, linked together distinct questions, strategies, and forms of action to form a topology of the Anthropocene: “Responding to the Anthropocene requires a grasp of its topology rather than its topography—of how it produces conditional relationships, not simply local disaster.”0.1.6 Likewise, curricula should always be approached topologically, whereby relationships and roles can be qualified and adjusted across contexts. There is no non-context; there is no view from nowhere. Every perspective is situated somewhere.0.1.7

One particular dimension of the challenge of multidimensionality has become a fundamental AC concern in its own right: a consideration of values.0.1.8 In many spaces, the assumption of shared values can lead to gross misunderstandings, or, in worst-case scenarios, the untoward wielding of power. For that reason, it is essential that curricula begin with locating the key values and purposes that ground them. For example, certain moments during the 2019 Anthropocene River Campus, held in and around New Orleans, highlighted this necessity: from the incongruity of names listed on a sign thanking sponsors,0.1.9 to questions of where research field trips end and disaster tourism begins.0.1.10 This process means neither legitimating nor critiquing certain values out of hand, but instead mandates that, like any good scientific research, underlying assumptions and values must be clearly expressed so that knowledge can be reflected on from within the ambit of a particular context or value system. Like context, there is no value-neutral position: all ways of knowing are based on some presumptions; the point is to account for them.

The same is true of the next core facet: scale.0.1.11 One of the central challenges posed by the Anthropocene is to apprehend, understand, and bridge the multiple spatiotemporal scales involved when speaking about the Earth system. As the record of a 2016 “kitchen debate” between Paul N. Edwards and Gabrielle Hecht attests, attempting to “read” such scales can be perplexing at best.0.1.12 From macro-, to meso-, to micro-, the scale at which one enters an inquiry already dictates the scope of what is being understood and therefore drastically informs what one can discern from the inquiry. Similarly, human activities and their impacts are no longer scaled to the measure of the human. The growth and shrinking of material extraction, of urbanization, and of increasing populations has intense environmental—and, indeed, geological0.1.13—ramifications. Accounting for how this plays out at each scale—as attempted by the 2019 “Un/Bounded Engineering and Evolutionary Stability” seminar0.1.14 and the 2020 conversation “Coordinating Practice”0.1.15—demonstrates that each problem has multiple dimensions and that knowledge can be approached only through a multiplication of partial understandings.

The final dimension that the AC has revealed as being key to the development of curricula is mapping concepts. In the process of developing an experimental Anthropocene curriculum, a mapping of concepts and their uses in different contexts is crucial for building a common ground between knowledge practices if they are to negotiate bridges and intersections amid collective pathways. We have therefore come to realize the importance of key terms, which are anchor points to be negotiated and concepts that remain contested but still useful as navigational beacons along the way.

The micro-publication “A Curriculum for the Anthropocene,” for example, elaborates on a set of key terms negotiated for the first iterations and events of the Curriculum and used until 2016.0.1.16 That same year, participants of a seminar entitled “Whose? Reading the Anthropocene and the Technosphere from Africa” put together a conceptual glossary of terms “to subvert singular, hegemonic, Western-centric frameworks by accounting for a plurality of situated perspectives and experiences instead.”0.1.17 The AC platform’s research pool is sortable and filterable according to an always expanding compendium of key terms and methodologies, and this includes a folksonomy of terms sourced from users of the Field Notes web app. In the context of a curriculum, rather than imposing one single definition of a term or coming up with a rigid, collective consensus, it seems more generous to simply acknowledge that concepts are constantly defined in their particular usages, and these are then mapped alongside other usages, enabling various perspectives to productively engage their differences.

Such mapping also entails paying attention to how concepts and approaches are being deployed in the surrounding landscape. Accordingly, this pathway’s accompanying key contribution responds to the above question of how curricula might be constructed in the age of the Anthropocene. It attempts an answer by surveying other projects and initiatives within the digital realm that also are engaging in pedagogical practices of communication and collaboration in order to move with the transitional local and planetary conditions of the current era. Remaining fixed in place is not an option.