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DURHAM -- Durham's newest adult education initiative has no building, no tuition, no teachers and no course catalog.
The "Public School of Durham venture, is designed to be a do-it-yourself or open-source academy. Visit durham.thepublicschool.org online to propose, volunteer to teach or sign up to take a course. You can also make suggestions about what material should be taught in a class that other people have begun organizing.
Jasmina Tumbas, 29, is one of the co-founders of the school.
"I think there's not enough collaboration between people in academia and the community and across the Triangle area in general," said Tumbas, a fourth-year art history doctoral student at Duke. "And I like the idea of this autodidactic learning and proposing something you want to learn rather than something you want to teach."
The school's first class, on maps, featured Elin O'Hara Slavick, a UNC art professor, and the Counter-Cartographies Collective of Chapel Hill. It was held on Nov. 13 and drew around 30 people, even though only a handful had actually signed up.
Slavick, who discussed her series of map-based paintings of sites bombed by the U.S. military, was invited to speak by Public School co-founder Jessye McDowell, a UNC art student.
"There's an audience that is I think eager to participate, and there's a lot of people who aren't really aligned with Duke or UNC or [N.C.] State and all the other schools who I think feel more comfortable participating in things in that sort of context than a more formal institutionalized setting," Slavick said.
The school's next class, featuring gay-themed movie screenings, begins tonight. (Details are on the Web site.) Classes on music theory, Chinese calligraphy and art and crime have been proposed but not yet organized. The founders hope the school will gain momentum as more people learn about it.
There are eight other Public Schools, located in Berlin, Brussels, Helsinki, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Philadelphia and San Juan.
The network began in California with an artist named Sean Dockray, said Zach Blas, now a second-year doctoral student in Duke's literature program. Blas met the founder while studying in the UCLA design media arts department where Dockray was working.
In January, Blas decided to launch the Public School here. He got Dockray's blessing and enlisted fellow Duke students.
The school is not meant to remain in Duke's orbit. "We are really interested in opening up beyond [academia] and bringing in other types of people that can give really different perspectives," Blas said.
Nor is the school intended to be Durhamcentric, said Jenny Rhee, a postdoctoral literature scholar at Duke. "Raleigh, Chapel Hill, they seem like very rich places where something like this would be really exciting and would work really well," said Rhee, another co-founder. "Beyond the academy, certainly, but also beyond Durham."
