Into the Outside

Mosaics in Their Communities

This morning I was at the Utica Avenue subway station with a group of fourth graders.  The students, currently studying the rich history of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, were on their way to the Weeksville Heritage Center (a beautiful community resource that deserves its own full post).  Weeksville was founded in 1838 - only 11 years after slavery was abolished in New York State - as a safe haven and cultural epicenter for free black families.  Founded in part to guarantee voting rights for landholding black men, the community was a self-sustaining enclave with its own school, churches, and newspaper.  Today it's subsumed by the larger urban Bed-Stuy neighborhood and dwarfed by the Kingborough Houses just across Bergen Street.  But three period houses on the old Hunterfly Road still stand proud - impeccably-curated exemplars of Weeksville's heyday.  The houses are curated like time capsules from, respectively, 1860, 1900, and 1930.  The tiny, neat rooms and well-chosen artifacts make visible a heroic period in American existence. I highly recommend taking a tour, or taking advantage of the Society's many public programs, detailed on their website.

Before we got to the Weeksville Houses, though, we had to navigate the Utica station.  I've written about subway stations before, about their utility in the classroom as historical catalogs of the people and neighborhoods they underlie, and reflect.  Many MTA stations are impressive feats of engineering with lengthy histories, but we straphangers sometimes consider them ubiquitous, utilitarian shells that just help us get from point A to point B.  I must admit, I have never paid much attention to the public art within so many of the system's stations.  But here at the Utica station in the heart of Bed-Stuy is a breathtakingly colorful mosaic in the folk tradition of the best Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden.  I asked the students to take special note of it on our walk above ground: what story does the mosaic tell?  What types of people, jobs, and communities are represented?  How can this mosaic inform our study of Bed-Stuy?  How can our trip to Weeksville re-inform our opinion of the mosaic?

Thanks to www.nycsubway.org, I now know that the mosaic is entitled "Children's Cathedral" (why, I wonder!) and that the artist is someone named Jimmy James Green (who is he, and with what authority does he artistically represent Bed-Stuy?)   What began as a trip to Weeksville suddenly now included an art investigation.  Resources and tie-ins, I've noticed, are everywhere - in subway stations, on the sides of abandoned buildings, in housing project lots.  Studying public art can deepen a community investigation, and often the most provocative and useful pieces, like Green's "Children's Cathedral" at the unassuming Utica Avenue station, literally commute with us every day.

Music as a Way to Help Kids Learn

Like most 2 1/2 year olds, my daughter loves to listen to music. She can go into her room, put in a CD, then after pounding on the buttons for awhile, she will finally get lucky and hit the play button. After the music starts, she will crank up the volume to a level that a teenager would appreciate and jam out to the Philadelphia Chickens or Toddler Favorites, sometimes even Baby's First Beethoven. It cracks me up when I find her in her room sitting in front of the CD player, just singing along to the music. Then, the other day I noticed that not only does she know many of the words to tons of different songs, but she actually knows the order of the playlist. For example, when The Marching Dinosaurs ends, she know that Tomorrow is coming up next--even if they are track numbers 12 and 13. This is something I don't even know and believe me I'm also listening to these CDs right along with her every single day.

This got me thinking about how kids brains are little sponges and how music is such a fantastic way for them to learn. As you know if you've read my blog, Madeline is in a Dual Immersion preschool program, where they speak English half the day and Japanese half the day. She has been in this school for about 5 months now and, honestly, so far I have barely heard her speak a word of Japanese untl the other day she came home singing a Japanese song from beginning to end. I couldn't understand a word, but that didn't stop her from belting it out over and over again.

I feel like after kids get out of the very young years of schooling, music is no longer integrated into the regular curriculum. Some schools may still have music class where kids learn to sing traditional American and holiday songs. But, I don't believe most teachers actually use music in the classroom to assist with learning and memorization after about Kindergarten. Especially in language classes, it seems like such a useful tool to help students memorize phrases and help with pronounciation. In addition, for schools that don't have the resources to have separate music classes, integrating it into the regular curriculum allows these children to still be exposed to music.

I see how much freedom and joy Madeline and her friends get from listening to (and dancing to) music, and I believe that this reaction is a really a human reflex. We should take advantage of this reflex as a way to help our children of any age learn.

"Choking on Growth": China's Environmental Crisis

Since August 2007, the New York Times has run a series on China's burgeoning over-development and pollution concerns.  Its thesis?:  "The speed of China's rise as an economic power is unprecedented, as is the scale of its environmental problems."  Entitled "Choking on Growth," the 10-part series contains articles on the fates of endangered soft-shelled turtles and the politics of "greening" a polluted Beijing for the upcoming Olympics.  The print series also has a comprehensive online component - with nifty videos, interactive maps, graphs, striking photos, and an Expert Roundtable Q & A for each article.  All articles have been translated into Mandarin, and the translation is available for MP3 download.  There's so much to look at, listen to, and work with here.  This series, like many other multi-part articles increasingly available on the Times' website, are like untapped treasure troves for educators.  They contain inbuilt visual aids, maps, audio, written text - all the necessary tools for differentiated instruction in the classroom.

Using the New York Times in the classroom however, especially in elementary schools, may seem daunting.  After all, the "grey lady" of daily American papers has a reputation in some circles for being inaccessible and unnecessarily highbrow.   But I've found a lot of the Times' online content very useful in designing lesson plans for elementary students.  Just this morning I developed an activity around "Choking on Growth's" turtle article.  The students are investigating the loss of biodiversity in China by looking at its endangered species.  So this morning they began by defining "Endangered," a term that I think is both overused and under-defined.  Then I asked them to look independently at the graph at left: what did they find interesting?  and what new questions did they now have?  "Why did the mapmakers decide to focus on these four species," I asked, "when we know that there are many more endangered species in China?"  The students then discussed species that interested them; I read an abbreviated version of "China's Turtles, Emblems of a Crisis."  Tomorrow we'll watch the related videos (also linked on the site) to get ideas for designing a public service announcement.  Ultimately the students will choose a species of interest, storyboard, act in, and record an awareness campaign PSA.

Each article contains so much wonderful material!  It would be great to incorporate the Mandarin recordings into a lesson about language.  Or a teacher could download images and ask the students to record their noticings:  How do the pictures and headlines inform each other?  How do the images, taken together, tell their own story about China's environmental crisis? 

Who said the holiday season was over?

Though many of us are through with 2007 and have long forgotten the holiday break, an event two Sundays ago made me pause in my tracks to contemplate if this was really true. Mid-afternoon on January 6th, I emerged from the L train at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan and Graham (also known as “Avenue of Puerto Rico”) to find before me several black sheep on rope leashes. As I looked right and left on Graham Avenue, taking in the sounds of competing brass bands and the visuals of brightly clothed children dancing to a uniform step, I wondered what the occasion was for such a parade. Asking a passerby, I quickly ascertained that this was the “Parade of the Three Kings” (“Parada de los Reyes Magos”), distinctly characterized by sheep, donkeys, camels, dancing men dressed as kings and Latin music, along with floats of all kinds created by members of the local community.  Included is a photo of the puppets displayed as part of the Three Kings Parade in Harlem, associated with El Museo del Barrio.

Upon further examination, I discovered that January 6th in the Christian calendar is the day of Christ’s Epiphany, 12 days after his birth on December 25th and the culminating event of the traditional Christmas season. Epiphany is a word that means, “to show,” “to make known,” or “to reveal,” and in the Latin American Tradition (Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, South American, and Spain), Three Kings’ Day commemorates the day when the three kings brought presents to the baby Jesus, a gesture which in effect “revealed” him to the world as the Lord and King. The night before, children customarily leave bits of hay beside their beds to feed the animals, which are exchanged for gifts in the morning.

The thing that struck me about this celebration is that its central function is the renewal of community. While the day of the Epiphany is a specifically Christian holiday, the celebration of renewal and honoring children is something that is central to most cultures. There are many ways of using the resources of New York City in the classroom, and my experience with the parade illustrates one point of entry for investigating a specific local community or making a comparison across countries or communities. This gave me an idea for a fun assignment: tell your students over the course of a week or a weekend to observe their local surroundings and jot down any community events that they see. Once they have a list of observations, guide them to research what they witnessed and see what larger points you can help them to draw about their local community. For a more directed approach, pick a weekend when you know a local event is taking place near school (a street fair, parade, or even a fruit market) and develop the project around that one specific event. Encouraging students to really pay attention to what is around them and to learn from their environment is truly the first step in developing inquisitive adults. Are there any local events that you have used as a learning tool?

Field Trip Anxiety

The more I'm out in the field with students, the more I realize that field trip anxiety (in all of its manifestations) is a very real phenomenon.  Field experiences are full of unknowns for students and teachers alike.  People are often - and understandably - preoccupied with logistics: will everything go according to plan?  Will we be on time?  How will we get there?  Teachers have further questions about content and student engagement: will the students enjoy the trip?  Will they learn?  Will the experience be authentic? 

Reading all the available scholarship on the importance of field trips yields surprisingly few answers.   Jones and Myers, in their article "Effective Use of Field Trips in Educational Programming" briefly discuss the teacher's role in pre-trip instruction.  They write about "vicarious exposure" to destinations and reviewing safety and behavior expectations.  But what does this all mean, and how does it look in the classroom?  How can teachers and students work together to create real-world strategies for demystifying trip anxiety?

For me, pre-trip instruction has been hit and miss: at first I tried to visit the classroom the day before, but that seemed to excite the students and make the day of the trip too chaotic.  I've found that short presentations on the day of the trip are most effective.  That way, the trip reminder stays fresh without taking over other classroom instruction.  As Jones and Myers suggest, I usually bring a visual - a Google map, a subway layout, a blueprint - to help demystify our transportation and our destination.  The teachers and I then share the trip's content.  We tell the students what we will be doing - taking a tour, doing a worksheet, sketching our observations.  I sometimes bring worksheet facsimiles (when we visit restaurants, I bring an authentic menu) to familiarize the students with the interactions between destination and activity.  But what I consider the most important aspect of pre-trip instruction, the interactive Q and A, is really student-driven.  And believe me, they often ask wonderful, probing questions that keep the trip organizers on their toes: "How will we get there?" "Is the place big?" "Who are we going to meet when we get there?"  If the question is observational - "What will the store look like?" - then I ask the student to hold onto it until we're in the field.  I then ask her her own question, and her answer is far more accurate and meaningful than any of my canned responses.

I'm curious to hear other experiences with pre-trip instruction.  What visual organizers help remind your students about trip expectations?  How do you conduct your question and answer component?  Even though a successful field trip pivots on effect pre-trip communication, the dialog about overcoming trip anxiety remains mum.  Hopefully we can start to share more and more strategies that will help other educators breathe a little easier the next time they bring students out into the field.

Trade Cards: The Billboards of 19th Century America

For awhile now, I've wanted to use the Brooklyn Public Library's eccentric Fulton Street Trade Card Collection in the classroom.  Trade cards were the business cards, billboards, and subway ads of the American Victorian Era.  They promoted businesses and services - often centralized along commercial strips - in visually arresting ways.  As the Collection's digital archive puts it, "The cards combine humor, bright and elegant graphic design and typography to promote a wide variety of wares and services."  BPL's impressive collection contains 245 late 19th and early 20th century cards, all viewable online from any location.  The cards, like the jeweler's promo at left, are often fanciful and full of anachronistic riddles (How exactly do a hunter, his dog, and a lobster, help advertise a jewelery store?  Maybe your students have some answers).  But the cards' whimsy and design seem a perfect fit for elementary classrooms.  Students could easily and creatively illustrate their own modern trade cards for neighborhood businesses that they know and patronize. 

When taken together though, a trade card collection almost functions like a map.  Imagine selecting a few eye-popping cards for your students to observe.  What do they notice?  What business or service does the card promote?  Why do you think the illustrator made certain artistic choices (how does a lobster represent jewelry, for instance)?  Can you read the address?  Then pull out a map and have students plot those addresses along a familiar commercial thoroughfare.   Using the trade card collection, the students have thoroughly mapped the stores of Fulton Street in 1898!  The map could then be expanded by gluing trade cards, real or created, for each address.  It could be "three-dimensionalized" into a diorama - encourage the students to imagine the street as it was, its sights and smells, its signage and its people.  If you want the students to explore differences between "then" and "now," you might take a contemporary walking tour of that same strip.  What do they notice this time around?  Does the street look different than it did in their imagined maps and dioramas?  From there, the students might have questions and conversations about commerce and business.  Communities have for generations depended on both the stability and the eternally changing nature of commerce in their midst. 

I now realize that many of my posts are Brooklyn-centric, and this one is no exception.  BPL's Fulton Street Trade Collection collection may seem similarly specific and spatially confined.  However, I think this kind of mini-unit can be modified for any town with a record of its businesses over time.  Many City Halls and municipal organizations maintain exhaustive records, maps, and ledgers of who provided services where, and when.   Downtowns have been historically at the heart of so many American communities.  This unit, whether it begins with whimsical trade cards from Brooklyn or with an outdated phonebook from Peoria, could be an dynamic curriculum that incorporates primary source documents and local fieldwork.

The Year of the Rat

Just as most of us are shuffling back to work and school this week after our own New Year's festivities, many cultural institutions around the city are preparing programs to celebrate another new year: the Chinese Lunar New Year on February 7, 2008 is the Year of the Rat, and while the Manhattan Chinatown Dragon Parade is the best-known public manifestation of Lunar New Year celebrations in New York, a little sleuthing online reveals lots of wonderful programs for students and teachers, for children and families, in the outer boroughs as well.  Most events come off some time in early February, but save the date now; they're sure to be well-attended, day-long affairs which already deserve a place on next month's calendar.

On Sunday, February 3 from 10:00-4:30, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden will host a Lunar New Year Celebration and Flower Market.  All ages should be satisfied: there will be children's and adult visual arts workshops and guided tours of the Garden's fabulous Asian Plants greenhouses.  When you're there, be sure to check out what looks like a dynamite new exhibition of Chinese women's peasant art from the far reaches of the rural mainland.  And the celebrations at BBG don't begin and end on February 3.  The art will hang until March 3, and Brooklyn Children's Museum will host an on-the-go "Flora and Fauna of the Chinese New Year" program at the Garden on February 10.  Elsewhere along Brooklyn's own "Museum Mile," both the Brooklyn Museum and the Public Library are hosting their own activities on Saturday 2/2 and Sunday 2/10 respectively.

Over in Staten Island, the Staten Island Botanical Garden invites you to celebrate the New Year in their charming Chinese Scholars Garden, seen at right, just about the most idyllic setting to muse on and usher in all the luck and good fortune of the new year.  Although many of these programs are held on weekends and after-school, the content  - the dragon masks and the dance steps, the knowledge of Asian flowers and the understanding of the animal zodiac -  is easily brought back and replicated in the classroom.  I encourage you to get out there this month and next and enjoy the many pleasures of the new season in the Year of the Rat!