Open Access Curriculum

What is an open access curriculum? This project hopes you will move out from this site in new directions. We offer a work in progress that is a learning experience for us and for you. This site is not a commercial portal nor is it within a formal program offered by an educational institution.

We ask: How can we learn from storytelling and myth-telling about our world in a time of digital culture, new media, lockdowns, and travel far from the homes and places we know? Inspired by the Wilderness Storytelling bookwork and by other web projects, this site is an experiment. We reimagine written and oral texts, the soundscapes of places, the sound of waves hitting different types of shoreline, the signature sounds different trees make, or the insistent vocalizations of birds, insects, whales, and other animals as a symphonic text of places that we all learn from continuously. We may have forgotten these voices and soundings, but we are quickly brought to our senses by a buzzing bee, captivated by a story, or enchanted by the mood and history of a place.

All of these instances of attention to the world and to Others involve learning. These are pedagogical moments. By placing these moments into stories, sensations organize themselves for understanding so that they can be remembered and acted upon. These stories may be traditional oral histories or mixtures of multimedia, online information, and everyday experiences. Actions and Projects allow us to test the lessons in the current world and feedback these experiences into our own life stories.

An open access curriculum can be pursued by anyone:

Read any parts of the chapters of the bookwork in any order.

For each session of reading, find a family tale, a local song, myth or story.

Ask yourself what the key teaching of the story is, who was the teller, and where/when was the story told.

Tell the story to someone else or a group.

What set of other stories, songs or art works is your story part of?

Who else or what places or libraries collect local stories? Send them one.