I’ve argued before that Black Studies should shape the way we structure curriculum. For that to be possible, we must define curriculum structuring.
The longer I worked in curriculum, the less convinced I became that our biggest problem was content. That surprised me. Like many educators, I had been taught to think about curriculum as a matter of selection. Improvement meant choosing better standards, better sources, and better examples. Even our disagreements assumed that better curriculum meant better materials. I believed that for a long time because it was how I had learned to think about curriculum. It was also the assumption I found myself questioning in a post arguing that Black Studies is too often understood as an additive project. The more I reflected on my own practice, the more I realized that adding content, while necessary, rarely transformed the experience of learning.
At first, I assumed the answer was better teaching. When students struggled to make connections, I redesigned lessons. When discussions stalled, I rewrote questions. When units felt disconnected from students’ lives, I searched for stronger primary sources. Those changes mattered. They made me a more thoughtful teacher. But after a while I noticed something I could not explain. Individual lessons improved while the intellectual experience of the unit often remained the same. Students could explain Reconstruction. They could describe the Great Migration. They could identify the major goals of the Civil Rights Movement.
Then I asked what connected those histories. The room became unusually quiet. Students flipped back through their notes. After a long pause, one student finally offered, “They all happened to Black people.” It wasn’t a wrong answer. It revealed something I had never asked the curriculum to do. Students had learned each unit. They had not been invited to investigate the relationships between them. The curriculum had prepared them to move from one topic to the next. It had done far less to help them recognize the enduring questions stretching across them.
For a long time, I thought I needed better lessons. Eventually, I realized I needed a different question. Instead of asking what content was missing, I began asking how the curriculum itself was organizing knowledge. I don’t think most teachers inherit curriculum with the intention of fragmenting understanding. Most of us inherit structures that already exist. We learn to improve lessons, refine assessments, increase engagement, and differentiate instruction. Rarely are we invited to examine the architecture connecting those decisions. I certainly wasn’t. The word architecture stayed with me because it described something I had been experiencing but could not yet name.
Walk into a building and you rarely think about its hallways. You simply follow them. A doorway quietly suggests one direction while making another less likely. Windows frame certain views while leaving others unseen. Once the building has been constructed, its design almost disappears. We experience its consequences far more often than we notice its structure. Curriculum works in much the same way. Before students encounter a single lesson, someone has already decided where the story begins, which ideas belong together, what deserves sustained attention, and where the inquiry will eventually end. Those decisions become so familiar that we mistake them for common sense. Content matters. Historical accuracy matters. Representation matters. But none of those questions can be separated from the structure through which students encounter them. Structure is not separate from content. It is the condition that gives content coherence and meaning.
Later, through conversations with educator Abigail Henry, we developed the idea of Blackprint to describe a Black educational tradition rooted in lineage, historical preservation, creativity, and collective responsibility. The concept did not emerge from curriculum design. It emerged from a larger question about what it means to preserve, cultivate, and extend Black intellectual traditions across generations. As I reflected on that work, I found myself returning to questions I had already been asking about curriculum. If Blackprint describes a broader educational tradition, what does it require of curriculum? Increasingly, I came to believe that the answer is not simply more inclusion. It is a different organization of knowledge. That realization changed the way I designed units. The changes were rarely dramatic. Sometimes they began with a single question. Rather than asking students to identify the causes of the Great Migration, I asked, What does a community carry with it when it is forced to leave home? The history remained.
Students still examined census records, photographs, newspaper articles, and oral histories. They still studied migration patterns and demographic change. But the sources no longer functioned as illustrations of a historical event. Students began treating them as evidence in an investigation. They debated what communities preserved, what they rebuilt, and why institutions became essential when familiar structures disappeared. Not every conversation unfolded the way I imagined. Some students kept searching for the one correct answer because that was the kind of history they had learned to expect. Others were uncomfortable sitting with questions that refused easy resolution. That discomfort became part of the lesson. Reorganizing curriculum also requires students to reorganize their expectations about what historical understanding demands. The content had changed very little. The organization had changed almost entirely. That distinction stayed with me because it raised a larger question.
If changing the organization of a single unit could reshape how students interpreted history, what might it reveal about curriculum itself?
This is one of the reasons Sylvia Wynter‘s work has become so important to my thinking. Wynter reminds us that societies do not simply accumulate knowledge; they organize it through particular ways of seeing the world. Read through that lens, curriculum is not merely a sequence of lessons. It is one of the principal ways schools organize social knowledge. Every curriculum already embodies assumptions about what deserves attention, what counts as evidence, and which questions are worth asking. Black Studies does not simply broaden that conversation. It asks us to reconsider the architecture that has been shaping it all along.
We spend considerable time debating what belongs in the curriculum. We spend far less time examining the structure that gives those pieces their meaning. Increasingly, I wonder whether that is where the more important conversation has been waiting. Perhaps before we decide what to include, we have to ask a more difficult question.
What kind of thinking is our curriculum designed to make possible?
