Cracks in the Curriculum Resource 3: Barby Asante, Countless Ways of Knowing

Barby Asante‘s Countless Ways of Knowing – A Mixtape on Education as a Practice of Freedom, is an invitation for educators in primary, secondary, further and higher education to create safe spaces for people of colour (POC) to feel confident to speak their lived experiences. It aims to open up a space for teachers and students to talk about race and racism in the classroom.

The resource features a series of questions for critical discussion, activities for the classroom and a reading list for further study. On the reverse is a quote by James Baldwin selected by Barby Asante, alongside a still from Asante’s project with sorryyoufeeluncomfortable Baldwin’s Nigger RELOADED.

• Why do Black Lives Matter?

• How do we as educators develop discursive and creative opportunities to support understanding of why Black Lives Matter?

• What opportunities are there for young people to critically and creatively transform the polarising narrative around race?

You can download a pdf version below or email jemmae@serpentinegalleries.org to request an A2 printed version that opens out to form a poster that can be displayed in your classroom.

Cracks in the Curriculum is a workshop series and publishing platform for teachers, which aims to bring artists and educators together to think about how to address pressing social issues in the classroom.

The Cracks in the Curriculum series explores key questions and themes that run through the Serpentine Education, Exhibition and Live programmes. The content for each resource emerges from workshops with artists, activists and educators.

Barby Asante is a London-based artist, curator and educator whose work explores space, place and identity. The drive of her work is to create spaces for dialogue, collective thinking, ritual and re-enactment. Using archival material in the broadest sense, she is interested in breaking down the language of archive, not to insert or present alternatives to dominant narratives but to interrupt, interrogate and explore the effects and possibilities of the unheard and the missing.

Recent projects include: As Always a Painful Declaration of Independence. For Ama. For Aba. For Charlotte and Adjoa, an ongoing project that performatively collects stories of Women of Colour, of which an iteration was shown in the Diaspora Pavilion, Venice 2017 and Run Through, a collaboration with architect Gian Givanni which showed in BLUEPRINT: Whose urban appropriation is this?, curated by Metro 54 at TENT, Rotterdam. She is also part of agency for agency, previously working in collaboration with Serpentine Youth Forum with students from Westminster Academy.