Education

Counterpublic takes a holistic approach to education throughout each exhibition cycle, including creating a comprehensive curriculum for classroom use, supporting fully funded field trips, embedding in university coursework and offering graduate-level fellowships.

Curriculum

For its recent exhibition cycle, Counterpublic engaged two dual advisors to create curriculum materials: Lemon Battery designed interactive tools for site visits and a toolkit for educators based on our anchor sites of Sugarloaf Mound, Mill Creek Valley, and The Griot Museum of Black History. EducationPlus created a comprehensive curriculum that met core Missouri standards to be incorporated into St. Louis-area classrooms.

These activities include:

  • Interactive worksheets responding to our three focus areas: Sugarloaf Mound; Mill Creek Valley; and St. Louis Place

  • Comprehensive curriculum for classroom use

  • Toolkit for any educators who are planning to bring their students, which included guidance on extending the learning in the classroom 

  •  Outreach to teachers to invite them to engage the learning tools and tailor them for their classes.

The curriculum was designed to remain relevant and useful for educators and partners beyond the dates of the exhibition, creating interactive learning tools responsive to St. Louis students specifically and offering inspiration for learning through art.

Field Trips

Counterpublic supported twenty-five fully funded field trips for schools in need and coordinated additional visits from students around the region. In total, 1,082 students visited Counterpublic 2023 through guided field trips led by exhibition staff. They visited established itineraries organized around the three focus areas, with most visiting five or more sites on the tour. Students were drawn from elementary, middle and high schools as well as colleges and universities in the region.

Schools and programs served included:

  • St. Louis Public School District

  • Normandy School District

  • East St. Louis School District

  • Boys and Girls Club of St. Louis

  • Atlas Academies

  • Kairos Academies

  • Gephardt Institute

  • St. Louis University

  • Washington University in St. Louis

  • Webster University

  • and more

University Coursework + Fellowships

Counterpublic engaged in a number of in-depth partnerships with colleges and universities to develop advanced coursework for students focused on our exhibition themes and research.

Coursework included:

Fall 2022 Masters of Urban Design at Sam Fox School of Architecture, led by Linda Samuels. 

This year-long urban design studio taught by Linda Samuels led students along a focused study of Counterpublic’s exhibition footprint through a lens of policy, infrastructural investment, mobility, and more. Students selected Counterpublic artists and sites as focus areas to develop their final projects to consider the past, present and future of Jefferson Avenue and St. Louis.

Spring 23 advanced seminar course at St. Louis University. Radical Art/Work: Art and Politics in the US. Led by Olubukola Gbadegesin, Ph.D., Associate Professor in Department of African-American Studies and Department of Fine and Performing Arts, Art History. 

In Dr. Bukky Gbadegesin’s course, students focused on Counterpublic 2023 artists to reflect on the question, “what kind of work can art do to impact our political realities?” Meeting with Counterpublic staff, curators, and artists, the students gained an interior view to the formation and realization of the exhibition, and its goals to create generational impact across a variety of approaches.

Fall 2022-Spring 2023 Memory for the Future Lab

Memory for the Future (M4F) is a year-long "studiolab" based at the Lewis Collaborative in St. Louis. M4F combines the study of interlinked histories and legacies of colonialism, slavery, and genocide with collaborative development of reparative public humanities projects in St. Louis. Counterpublic was one of the core partners with professors Geoff Ward, Anika Walke, and post-doctoral fellow Santiago Rozo-Sanchez. This partnership resulted in a public workshop by student Carrie Keasler during Counterpublic, A Presence of Absence: Re-presenting the Erased at Central Print in Old North St. Louis around the framework of multi-directional memory.

Kalamazoo College

The Kalamazoo College Humanities Integrated Locational Learning program brought faculty and students from different humanistic disciplines at Kalamazoo to St. Louis to engage in justice-based notions of land, place, displacement and belonging, centered on St. Louis’s specific histories.