Into the Outside

Taíno Curricula: A World of Opportunity

To satisfy NYS core curriculum standards for Social Studies in The Western Hemisphere: Latin America, the 5th grade classes I am working with discuss Taíno culture as a way to chronologically kick off their year-long investigation of Hispaniola. But the cultures, geographies, and histories of the Taino people are so strong and varied that it's easy to imagine a Taíno investigation as part of a Global Communities curriculum, or a point of comparison for studying other indigenous "American" cultures in an early American history unit.

The more I talk with Taíno cultural experts around the city, the more I hear echoes of the same sentiment: it's awfully exciting to find out that Taíno culture is increasingly becoming a part of the curriculum in New York City public schools!  The people I've worked with so far - from museum educators to performing artists - have all been warm and genuinely enthusiastic about introducing students to the richness of pre-Columbian Taíno culture.  The Taíno Indians, before Columbus, inhabited much of the Caribbean including the Bahamas, present-day Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola.  I get the sense that the community in New York is close-knit - people sharing similar interests and a passion for shining light on notoriously underrepresented indigenous peoples.  Connecting with that community is an educator's dream.  One person refers you to another, and soon enough a bevy of cultural resources seem to appear.  The Voice of the Taino People blog is a vibrant living document that compiles news and cultural events relating to Taíno peoples in the Caribbean and the Diaspora.

And the Taíno legacy is so alive in New York City today!  To so many students of Caribbean descent (and there are many in New York's schools), a Taíno artifact is not just a dusty museum relic but something with familial, personal significance.  Maybe a student recognizes that wooden device from his grandmother's kitchen. Another realizes that the music she grew up listening to in 21st century Brooklyn actually pre-dates Columbus, and the instruments are, miraculously, the same. On a recent trip to the National Museum of the American Indian (also raved about by my co-blogger Margot), I was tickled to see so many students recognizing traditional Taíno artifacts as household goods.  This surprising bridge, between contemporary life in Brooklyn and indigenous daily life on Hispaniola, would not have come nearly as alive without our full investigation of Taíno culture. 

Tourist or Traveler?

In our current times of affordable air travel and high speed internet, I am pressed to think about the difference between a tourist and a traveler. I was introduced to this comparison by the director of a study abroad program I attended in Greece when I was a senior in high school. I remember distinctly how the lesson traced back the roots of each word: the verb to ‘tour’ comes from the Greek word ‘tornos,’ a tool used for making a circle; to ‘travel’ comes from ‘travail,’ which has a number of Latin and French roots all essentially meaning to toil, labor, and in some instances, to suffer. The lesson was meant to instill in my adolescent mind that in order to be a traveler, to thirst for a new perspective and to really progress from one point to the next, I would have to work very hard, to go through periods of extreme difficulty and perhaps not even know when the journey would end. Any other kind of touring would just be an act of circling, making a change in physical space only to return unchanged to the point of origin.

I have been mulling this distinction over in my mind this November ever since I returned from a week-long conference on International Theater that took place on a breathtakingly quiet island in Venice, Italy. A city made up of a conglomerate of small islands in Northern Italy, known for its ornate brand of architecture and its 12th to 15th Century sea empire, Venice today stands on the foundation of the ever-growing industry of tourism. All signs are written in English as well as Italian; the narrow waterways are filled with decorated gondolas (long paddle boats) for a leisurely, but rather costly transit; there is a local rate and a much higher tourist rate for the waterbus, a cheaper form of boat transport all over the city; and every harbor is speckled with tourist shops selling small, mass-produced theatrical masks, glass knick-knacks, disposable cameras, etc. On the smaller island of Guidecca, where our program took place, I was relieved to find very little tourist activity. I could walk the cobble-stone streets and small arched bridges, admiring the narrow pathways in between colorful houses with laundry neatly hung out the windows and spirited collections of plants on doorsteps. I could drink a cappuccino at the local bakery in the morning, say a friendly “ciao” (“hello”) to every passerby, witness children playing on a small playground in a tiny square and families walking their dogs. While some of the larger tourist attractions are certainly worth their while, I was grateful to have a purpose in the city for the week that enabled me to live life amongst the people of the island, to get a sense of the care and whimsy with which they go about their daily routines, and appreciate the artistry in both the man-made and natural landscape. While one week is certainly not enough to begin understanding Italian culture and values, visiting the country in a means that was focused on learning rather than consumption was an excellent start.

This brings me back to the question of passing on this lesson to the children I work with: how can a teacher instill the importance of being a traveler and NOT a tourist even in one’s own city. How can a teacher take a group of students on a field experience and ensure that they are coming home with at least one new question, a tiny shift in perspective? It is an important question that I think we must ask ourselves in an age where tourism is readily accessible and where traveling requires a search even to begin.

Re-discovering Our Natural Past

Towards the end of the summer, I was seized with the overwhelming feeling that I could not breath in Manhattan’s inescapable cauldron of warm concrete and recycled air. Having caught wind of the existence of Native American caves, I embarked on an investigative journey to the northernmost tip of Manhattan into what I discovered to be its last remaining natural forest. My destination, the Inwood Hill Park Nature Center, a division of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, stands on the northern edge of Inwood Hill Park at 218th street in Washington Heights and serves as an in-park community center for public education, recreational activities, and environmental studies. There I met with the personable and well-informed head ranger who introduced me to the variety of programming they do under the auspices of “The Natural Classroom,” an educational program developed by the city parks department built around the natural and cultural history of each park involved. Before leaving, I took my own walk through the high canopied forest, breathing in its rich, oxygen-filled air and exploring a series of meandering paths that wind uphill and curve around the western edge of the park, revealing breathtaking views of the Hudson River below.

Just last week I returned with a group of Middle School students for their program centered around the Native American history of Inwood Hill Park entitled, “Native Americans: Pathways to the Past.” The head ranger greeted us at the Nature Center and conducted the first part of his talk indoors with a display of artifacts - eating implements made from hollowed out squash and pumpkins, a rubbing stick for making fire, a lacrosse stick, a series of arrowheads, and a guest visit from the center’s resident snake. The ranger then headed towards the forest where he spoke of the various trees and herbs used for medicinal purposes, showed the disputed site on which the Lenape purportedly sold the island of Manhattan to the Dutch for a mere $24 in 1626, and ended with a couple of natural rock caves that were used for shelter.  As one would expect, students really loved being able to climb in and around the caves. Before we exited the forest to return to the students’ “natural” urban environment, we paused and asked the kids to look around them at the trees, the rocks, the glistening sun and crisp air, and to imagine that this was their living room, their hospital, their drug store and kitchen all in one. If they needed to keep warm, they would have to conduct the laborious task of creating a pelt from a live animal. If they were sick, they would use the plants themselves to remedy their sickness. Above all, this close relationship to Nature that is so central to Native American thought and practice was a lesson that only the natural world could teach, and we were fortunate to have found it in our own backyard. 

Learn more about the Natural Classroom and its programs.

Chinatown Foodways

A few years ago, the Museum of Chinese in America mounted a wonderful exhibit, "Have You Eaten Yet?", about the history of American Chinese restaurants, from the chow chow shacks of Gold Rush San Francisco to the dim sum parlors of New York's contemporary Chinatown.  Gish Jen wrote an eloquent review of the show for Slate and I remember it being a jam-packed exhibit of old menus, cartoons, and touching oral histories that also laid bare the stereotypes and inauthenticities that have unfortunately defined "Chinese" food in the popular American consciousness.  Most importantly though, the show introduced me to a way of thinking about, and relating to students, the development of ethnic enclaves like Chinatown.

Foodways are the eating habits and culinary practices of a people, region, or historical period.  Put another way, as the New Georgia Encyclopedia says, "foodways is the study of what people eat and why they eat it."  As the 2005 MOCA exhibit suggested, New York's Chinatown developed almost simultaneously with Chinese-American cuisine; the two literally fed into each other.  With greater Asian immigration to the area, more restaurants sprang up as food traditions from all over China started to revolutionize the kitchens of New York.  With this influx of cultures came a greater American demand for a new cuisine.  However estranged the food became from its Chinese counterparts, it still constitutes an important trend in American eating.  What better way to teach assimilation than by studying the fates of ethnic foods at the hungry mouths of "American" eaters!

Wouldn't a foodways investigation be a fascinating addition to any immigration or world community curriculum?  You could do a walking tour of historic restaurants, and write semi-fictional stories about the people who worked and ate there through the ages.  You might dig up old menus and have students compare what was served when, and make suppositions about why those dishes were popular.  Compare prices.  Even compare menu language: how is "Chinese" food in Chinatown marketed today, and to what audience?

But foodways are just one route to bringing Chinatown to the classroom.  New York's Chinatown (and don't forget its equally exciting outer borough cousins in Sunset Park, Brooklyn and Flushing, Queens) is a community so multifarious and vibrant, historical and new at the same time, that students could be engaged at any and every turn.

How Do Your Students Spend Their Weekends?

My husband is out of town this weekend so it's just me and my two year old at home on a rainy weekend in Tokyo. When Michael is here on the weekends, we often head out on adventures to random spots in Tokyo. But, this weekend, Madeline and I stayed pretty close to home--the rain being one factor, the daunting subway/road systems being the second. This low-key weekend, got me thinking about the experiences we normally have on the weekends and how valuable those experiences are to us and our daughter. Most of these outings cost very little in terms of yen, but have a big payout in terms of enjoyment.

Because I'm in Tokyo for only a few years, I often feel like a tourist here. I go places and see things that I would never have done in New York. In New York, I never went to the Bronx Zoo  or to a park besides Central Park and Riverside Park. I never made it to the Statue of Liberty or to the Aquarium in Brooklyn...and I lived in New York City for NINE years! But, here in Japan, we do the Tokyo-equivilent of these outings and they have all been so enriching to our lives here and our family interaction.

So, this got me thinking about a typical school classroom and how a teacher can help his or her students have fulfilling and educational family experiences on the weekend in their own city. Has anyone ever given their students a list of places to visit with their families on the weekend or encouraged their students to go on family outings? I feel like many families get stuck in the routine of errands and obligations on the weekend and don't set aside the few hours to get out there and have wonderful experiences with their kids. Perhaps with some teacher encouragement (and rewards...say, extra credit?) and a succinct list of options, students can have more fulfilling weekends and better experiences with their own families.

"Using the Subway" in the Classroom

In his great essay "Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn!" Brooklyn writer Jonathan Lethem begins with an adage, "When you're young, everything local is famous."  He then goes on to recall boyhood memories of a notorious old Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station, an odd little station with idiosyncrasies galore: a phantom platform, abandoned shop windows, mysterious signage from a bygone era.  He writes about the imprint the subway made on his memory then, and the pull it still has for him today.  In Lethem's observational world, the buried Hoyt-Schermerhorn station embodies the history of the neighborhood above it.  The storied subway, Lethem suggests, tells some of the borough's greatest stories.

I get off regularly at the Smith and 9th Street station, another weird station on the F-line that towers high above the Gowanus Canal.  The views are breathtaking (it's the highest elevated station in the system at 91 feet) but the infrastructure is somewhat shoddy in parts.  So shoddy in fact that NYC Transit is proposing a 2010 shut-down of the station to repair the Culver Viaduct. Smith and 9th is starting to be as meaningful to me as Hoyt-Schermerhorn is to Lethem...what will I do without its crumbly charms?  Today in class a student asked how long the station had been there.  I didn't know off the bat, but looked it up: since 1933, before the BQE, before the Red Hook Houses.  Incredible! 

All this attention to my favorite station got me thinking:  The subway stations of New York have truly seen it all.  They have seen generations of immigrants come and go.  They have ferried people to work, to their neighborhoods, and back again.  Just as Lethem uses Hoyt-Schermerhorn as a lens in his essay, so can any station be used in the classroom as a lens onto local history.  There are great online resources at www.nycsubway.org and Forgotten New York.  The Transit Museum in downtown Brooklyn on Livingston Street is a thorough overview resource as well, and its education/teacher resource website is very comprehensive.  But nothing beats visiting the crumbly, weird, historical stations themselves.  It can be a tactile, visual, and sensory experience for your students.

There are numerous ways to tackle "using the subway" in the classroom: you can trace neighborhoods along a particular arterial line - a nice approach to introduce the diversity of neighborhoods in a contained manner.  Or, if you're focusing on one neighborhood in isolation, the subway can inform the students about who came to the neighborhood when, and why.  What can the subway teach us about the city?  To students of any age, remember, everything local is famous.  And what's more local, or more famous, than the subways we come in contact with every day?

Sweet Potato Dig

This week, my daughter's preschool class piled into a small bus and headed out of Central Tokyo to a nearby suburb to visit a sweet potato farm. Each child, wearing his or her school smock, was accompanied by one parent. We brought our shovels and our lunches and were ready for an adventure.

The children loved digging into the mud, touching the soil, and pulling out the treasures--sweet potatos and diakon. Some kids even tromped through the mud in their barefeet. The experience of visiting a farm, seeing where vegetables come from, and actually touching and feeling a potato garden was fantastic for these consummate "city kids." Also, what I loved most, was bringing home the sweet potatos, cooking them, and having a meal for our family. My daughter was thrilled to eat the actual potato she dug out of the earth. I always say that I know Madeline had a great day when she is dirty from head to toe at the end of it, today was a very good day!

Those of us who live in urban environments, without so much as a square meter of grass to call our own, really appreciate the opportunity to feel fresh earth and see where the food we eat comes from. To actually dig something up, and then eat it for dinner that night makes one appreciate the meal much more than normal. Although this outing was for a group of 2 and 3 year olds, I believe a similar experience would be valuable for any school age group--the parents at the sweet potato dig actually seemed to enjoy the visit as much as (or more than) the kids. It's the interactivity of the outing, actually feeling the earth and discovering your bounty that makes this adventure  so valuable. 

NMAI: The Gem of Lower Manhattan

Many people think of the Wall Street area as a part of Manhattan frequented mostly by the more economically savvy New Yorkers. Since I have been working on an early American History project though, and Native Americans in particular, I have found myself in the Battery Park area almost every week - the main destination of my interest: the National Museum of the American Indian.

Located at One Bowling Green adjacent to the corner of Battery Park, the building alone is monumental. Housed in the former Alexander Hamilton U.S. Customs House, a seven-story neo-classical architectural masterpiece – deserving of its own in-depth study – the museum takes an awe-inspiring role of prominence in an area filled with the historical markers that shaped New York as we know it today. The museum is free to the public, open seven days a week, and stands as a cultural Mecca for American Indian studies in New York City.  (Check out their exhibits, hours, etc. at www.nmai.si.edu)

This week I brought two different classes to tour the museum, focusing in on its Iroquois Discovery Room, a small, interactive exhibit open to the public on Thursdays and Saturdays, and used for the museum’s educational programs. The teachers and I designed an activity sheet that would keep the students active and focused on the materials around them, ranging from a basket filled with essential items for the Iroquois (a beaver pelt, a skunk pelt, beans, squash, a wampum belt used for expressing friendship and political agreements) to a painted mural on the wall depicting the Iroquois Confederacy to a steel beam meant for kids to lift in pairs to exemplify the role of the Mohawk Iron Workers in NYC. We also took the students to the resource room, that contains books, additional artifacts, and a friendly staff that can help guide the way to further inquiry. One of the real gems currently on exhibit through July 20th in the main gallery is “Listening to Our Ancestors: The Art of Native Life along the North Pacific Coast.” The exhibition is representative of 11 native communities who have shared their perspective on ceremonial and every day objects that influence their way of life: from the most ornate dance regalia and large, dramatic masks to intricately carved serving utensils, woven carpets and seafaring implements. While this wasn't necessarily directly related to our investigation of the Iroquois, the room is so beautifully displayed and the objects equally impressive that the students were really able to absorb and admire this region’s way of life.

In further tribute to Battery Park and the NMAI, I was enticed down to the area two weekends ago for CultureFest NYC 2007, which featured free dance and music performances from an array of local performance groups as well as over 100 information booths designated to museums and non-profit arts organizations all over NYC. As part of Culturefest I wandered back into the NMAI to see the Git Hoan Dancers of the North Pacific Region who had flown in for the weekend – if only the students could have seen that! Did anyone else have a chance to visit Culturefest and walk away with any brainstorms for classroom activities?