Curriculum Guide
The Mixplace Curriculum developed over the course of the 2012-2013 inaugural year through a series of workshops, conference calls, and email exchanges. It was drafted by the steering committee, including representatives from People's Emergency Center (PEC), PennDesign, Slought Foundation, and Estudio Teddy Cruz. In a reflexive manner, it has been continually refined to incorporate the insights, tensions, and experiences of the youth researchers and design students involved in the studio.
As a space outside of school, Mixplace Studio balances structured and unstructured learning through a series of facilitated conversations and activities. In the Summer, for example, the curriculum takes the form of a visual menu that guides youth researchers through a series of choices, beginning with the selection of team members and culminating in the construction of neighborhood narratives. A primary goal of the curriculum is to foster a comfortable, process-based learning environment in which studio participants develop agency, civic imagination, and interpersonal trust, and welcome criticality and conflict.
A variety of resources - including texts, histories, and practices - inform our thinking at Mixplace Studio, and the ongoing development of the curriculum. Whenever possible, we share these resources online, which we also recommend to those interested in becoming involved in or learning more about the Studio:
- Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963, PDF) and Visit to Philadelphia (1965, Video)
- Arjun Appaduri, Toward an anthropology of things, from The Social Life of Things (1986, PDF)
- Grant Kester, Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Community Art (1995, PDF)
- Elijah Anderson, Down Germantown Avenue, from Code of the Street (1999, PDF)
- Amy Hillier, W.E.B. Du Bois and The Philadelphia Negro (2011, Video)
- Teddy Cruz, Where is Architectural Thinking? (2011, PDF)
- Aaron Levy, One Linear Mile: Towards a more hospitable architecture (2012, PDF)