Into the Outside

The Wild Center

This past weekend, as students and teachers in New York City were enjoying the waning days of their February break, I was upstate in the Adirondacks visiting the brand-new Wild Center, the Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks.  Located in Tupper Lake, NY (a traditional Adirondack town where I spent a lot of childhood summers), the Wild Center is a state-of-the-art interactive and multiuse facility set on a beautiful piece of property that abuts the Raquette River.  Outside there are snowshoeing and hiking trails, river overlooks, osprey nests, and a vibrant pond ecosystem.  Inside the museum, families and naturalists can explore a living river, from its tanks of deep lake fish and recreated duck ponds, to its shallow streams full of brook trout and gooey bog plants.  The exhibits are very thoughtful, interactive, and differentiated - there are multimedia presentations in every room, and touching everything is encouraged.  And the interior exhibits of the museum seem in lockstep with their more wild exterior ecosystems.  More than most museums, the Wild Center truly seems to embody the philosophies of Into the Outside.  It is a place where community resources flow seamlessly between the insides of institutions and the outsides of the natural world.

I know that I write a often about Brooklyn or New York City-based curriculum ideas.  But place-based curriculum can enrich any instruction in any corner of New York State.  I often hear teachers bemoan that they can't take their students all the authentic field trips that they'd like to, and that often they're hemmed in by regional or logistical concerns.  In other words, an overnight trip to Tupper Lake might seem more like a pipe dream.  But the Wild Center, and plenty of institutions like it all over the state, are working on exciting distance learning initiatives.  if you work with high school students, be sure to check out the Wild Center's Coolest Project competition; it asks high school students to think critically about the conservation of natural resources and to express their opinions and research about the challenges of global warming as they affect their communities.

The work that the Wild Center does in Tupper Lake isn't constrained by its location at all: it can be recreated for students in your local park, or on the Gowanus Canal, or even in examining the plants that peek through the pavement in the schoolyard.  Perhaps you could use the Wild Center's spatial layout as a template for your own in-class Natural History Museum of (insert your own community).  Natural history interacts with communities everywhere in such interesting ways, and the Adirondack Park is just one tiny microcosm of nature in New York.  Even if you can't expose your students to exciting exhibits upstate, you can bring an upstate museum mentality downstate by teaching the Wild Center's mission "to inspire broad public understanding of the systems that shape and sustain life" in your own backyard.      

Education on the Water

Have you ever done a survey of your class to find out how many students have ridden in a boat in their lives? Despite living on a series of islands, you'd be surprised to find that many New York students do not get the chance to get out on the water. I found that to be the case last week when I brought two fourth grade classes onto the Staten Island Ferry to experience the daily commute of Staten Island residents to the city. 

Our trip was designed to enliven the students' investigation of the Steam Ferry, which served as the primary mode of transportation across the East River between Brooklyn and Manhattan in the 19th century before the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883. Not only did many of the students experience riding on a boat for the first time, they also got a hands-on geography lesson of New York Harbor, distinguishing Lower Manhattan from New Jersey to the west and Brooklyn to the east not to mention Staten Island to the south; pointing out the Statue of LIberty, Ellis Island, Governor's Island; examining the various cargo and passenger ships in the harbor, the giant cranes all along both the Brooklyn and New Jersey waterfronts, and the deep sea vessels out in the Atlantic beyond the Verrazano-Narrows; and identifying the series of bridges that now connect Brooklyn and Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, and Williamsburg Bridge.

For our trip we enlisted the guidance of two educators from the Staten Island Museum who were able to add historical and geographical details, and to help smoothly guide the transition off the boat on the Staten Island side and back on the boat to return to Manhattan (it's a short window of time that requires hustling your group right along, because the boat won't wait). If you have the time to do a little background research and/or a test run, it would be alright to go without a guide. Admission is free, and the boat runs every half hour.

This is a great trip for classes learning the history of immigration and the geography of New York Harbor.  For educators who are interested in further exposing their students to New York waterways and maritime history, additional resources include:  the South Street Seaport Museum's various school programs on shipping throughout the 20th century (we drove past Pier 17 with the students on the bus in order to point out the Seaport's stationary shipping fleet); the Brooklyn Waterfront Museum, which has a great program on the history of the Tug Boat; and the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, which runs public programs to educate students and community members on the history of the Gowanus Canal in order to revitalize the Gowanus, Red Hook, and DUMBO shorelines.

Hearing how many students had not been on a boat before makes me think that getting children out on the water for an educational purpose is even more crucial for their exposure to new environments. Can anyone recommend other water-based educational programs in the city?

Making Paper from "Money/Trees"

When I was young, I liked to inspect paper money.  Much to my parents' chagrin, I'd stand in the cafeteria line and rip dollar bills in half.  I'd try to pull out individual threads and fix my microscope-like gaze on them: where did they come from? what were they made of? how did a whole cluster of these little fibers, pressed together, turn into money?  I had a revelation: money was paper! And paper, a deceptively mundane item that we take for granted daily, is actually a complex cultural item that's as historically and scientifically rich as the cultures that make it.

I work with a group of 2nd grade students who recently participated in a paper-making workshop through Brooklyn Children's Museum on-the-go programming.  We worked with abaca pulp, and it was a glorious, gooey mess.  But working with pulp is not just an opportunity to get our hands dirty.  It allows students to explore a rather abstract connection between the natural world (pulp as plants) and the physical one (pulp as paper).   Ask your students to name the papers they come in contact with every day (money, construction, notebook).  Then have them imagine (sketch and model) those papers' natural origins.   Ask them to look for paper-making materials in yards, sidewalk cracks, and supermarkets.  Maybe you decide to take a trip to Brooklyn's Carriage House Paper where your students can watch vats of pulp become beautifully-crafted artisan papers.

Or maybe you decide to take them to the Met, where students can discover live papyrus reeds and illuminated papyrus scrolls only feet away from each other.  Because paper is made, embedded in its story are the histories of its makers.  The Egyptian scribes who painstakingly pressed into service an unassuming Nile weed, and the 2nd graders who ripped up little pieces of newspaper and pulsed it into a gray recycled glob, both participate in an age-old process that marries history and science.  I encourage everyone to make paper with their students, and extend the learning into literacy (we need paper to write!), science (plants make paper!), and math.  Remember: the lesson can start with an item as simple as a dollar bill.

And please don’t forget your local library…

In a city with boundless options, we have a tendency to forget the resources that are sitting right at our doorstep. I recently followed a suggestion to bring a group of 4th graders to the Brooklyn Public Library to look at photographs from the Library’s digital collection of local Brooklyn neighborhoods in the 19th and 20th centuries. And what a good idea it turned out to be. The classroom teacher and I designed an activity wherein the students had to look at a series of photographs, arrange them in chronological order on their table, and identify some of the elements that helped place them in time. In our case, we focused on people and transportation, looking at changing styles of fashion (skirt length, hats, hair style, glasses, etc) and public and private transportation (buggies, steam ferries, trolleys, subways, etc.). I was pleasantly surprised by how excited the kids were to be in a new environment and how interested they were in the task at hand. The activity required group participation (5 kids to a table) and active involvement with the material on the table (both visual and tactile).

A trip such as this one requires help: one of the librarians working in the Brooklyn Collection facilitated our trip, meeting in advance to prepare, helping to guide our access to library resources, and providing a short introduction to the library to the kids during our visit. And librarians are probably the best kept secret as teaching resources: they like their jobs, they are actively interested in learning new material, they have a zeal for investigating unknown territory, digging up less accessible resources, and they are genuinely interested in helping the public. The librarian printed out around 35 photographs for our activity, which she allowed us to bring home, and she additionally gave us a couple of Brooklyn Almanacs to take back to the classroom.

While resources in your school may not be at their fullest, it is important to realize that there are resources in this city just around the corner. These fourth graders now know of a place that is central to their Brooklyn community that offers a new way of learning that is different from what they are used to in the classroom. It was a real revelation for me when at 18 years of age I was asked to investigate a genuine question on my own and return with the answer, when I realized that learning was an active process in which I actually wanted to participate. Why not begin that process sooner?

New Forms of Evaluating Activity-Based Learning

Every week we take students into the field to museums, businesses, historic landmarks, restaurants, exhibits, etc. and after every visit, we discuss ways to evaluate their experiences. These evaluations are typically based on how well the students participated or appeared to absorb information.  And a recent NY Times article entitled, “New York Measuring Teachers by Test Scores” got me thinking about the process of evaluation and how while testing is certainly one approach to evaluating students, there are also some powerful project-based ways to evaluate field experiences and hands-on learning activities.

For example, a group of teachers I am currently collaborating with are planning to create a cumulative visual representation of their unit, which focuses on immigration in three Brooklyn neighborhoods based on the changing modes of transportation available from the early 1800’s to today. They will be designating a classroom wall to each neighborhood with an ongoing timeline, so that each activity can be accompanied with a project that can be posted on the wall. This will serve as a cumulative way to see how students have progressed in their learning.

One part of this will include students conducting interviews of family members on their experience (current or historical) of immigrating to New York City. The students will use the interviews to develop a personal history book in which each student will create one page. In such a project, the teacher can easily gauge the work of each individual student based on a rubric of expectations, while at the same time each student will get a chance to see what his/her peers have learned as well. This collaborative project will, hopefully, lead to students wanting to meet a higher standard because his or her work is contributing to a larger whole. As the NY Times article points out, there are many things that go into measuring what "success"  means. The first step with students may just be helping them to understand how and why they are being evaluated and instead of having the evaluation tool be as private as a test, allowing the evaluation to take on a more constructive role by letting the learning be collective and public.