Schools can often be enclosed from the places where they are located, forced to focus on curricula and measures rather on the power dynamics that shape they, their neighbourhoods and the lives of students and teachers. What follows is a subverted curriculum, subverted because it does not follow the DfE guidance of individual accumulation of knowledge to be repeated back in a measured test. Rather this curriculum encourages a collaborative approach.
The curriculum is based on knowledge produced during the Edgware Road Project at St Marylebone School, a Performing and Visual Arts multi-faith Church of England School in West London. The project was a four-year residency in which the art collective Ultra-Red worked in the context of the school and the neighbourhood, involving teachers, administrators, students and local activists.
The School and the Neighbourhood: A Subverted Curriculum was produced using the online archive and publishing tool edgwareroad.org, created by Bombay based media collective CAMP while in residence on the Edgware Road. It is part of the series, Studies on a Road, in which groups who took part in the Edgware Road Project from 2008 – 2016, have shared their studies of the area and reflections on the stakes of the project.
The Possible Studies imprint was developed through the Edgware Road Project. Initiated by Serpentine Galleries in 2008 the Edgware Road Project links local groups and international artists with people living and working in this area. The itinerant project base for the project is the Centre for Possible Studies, home to screenings, events, a publishing imprint and an ongoing project archive. From 2016 the Possible Studies imprint will be housed at Church Street Library on a specially commissioned shelf dedicated to the local area.
