Episode 3

Jacqueline Simmons:
So, here we are at Wall Street, Pier 11. We're outdoors. It's a lovely day. Sun is shining. We're in a transportation hub, it turns out, right here on the water. And that means that there are helicopters that are coming into land at the heliport, near the Governor's Island Ferry. There are ferries that are coming in and out. And then these beautiful bridges off in the distance where we can see all of the commuter traffic going across. And then, so many people who are just starting to queue for the ferry home.

MUSIC:
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Sarah Gerth:
Welcome to Curriculum Encounters, a podcast about exploring knowledge wherever you find it.

Jacqueline Simmons:
And thinking about what kind of knowledge matters for teaching and designing curriculum. I'm Jackie Simmons, an associate professor at Columbia University's Teachers College.

Sarah Gerth:
And my name is Sarah Gerth. I am a research fellow at the Teachers College Digital Futures Institute. We are both educators and curriculum designers who care a lot about teaching and learning. In this podcast, we really want to encourage everyone to think deeply about knowledge and understand that you can have rich and varied learning experiences almost anywhere you find yourself. Come with us in this episode as we go to a ferry terminal, which really shifts our sense of perspective, an important quality for anyone concerned with what it means to learn and share what we know. So, much more is going on as we slow down to hear the helicopters, absorb the movement of commuters, and listen to the seagulls.

Jacqueline Simmons:
So, in this curriculum encounter, we were so taken with the sensory experience of being outside by the water, in the sun with so much activity around us, and what it does to our thinking about what we're doing today, and our bodies, and how we feel.

Sarah Gerth:
We started or we met up around 3:30, which is a big arrival-departure time. So, this pier was really packed with people getting off ferries, getting on ferries. And I docked at a very full city bike station. Jackie, you took the ferry over and you found a really lovely bench in the sun at the end of the pier to sit and wait. And we commented on how we were both struck by the smell of the water when we sat down and-

Jacqueline Simmons:
Yeah. And the company of the seagulls and the pigeons who are also their little tiny heads trained, trying to get those last bright hours of sun. There's so much to look at. I am looking at the water glistening right now, and it is so sparkly.

Sarah Gerth:
It's the kind of bright that almost hurts to look at.

Jacqueline Simmons:
And it's easy to ignore that the city is just adjacent to that sparkle. The highway is just out of view. I can turn my head and just slightly avoid it. So, it just looks like the beauty of the water.

Sarah Gerth:
And if I pivot to face the city, I'm struck by how odd it is to not actually stand on the island itself and how these tall buildings look quiet. Being out here on a pier totally changes my perspective.

Jacqueline Simmons:
Yeah. Down here in the Wall Street area, these tall buildings really create so much shadow in the streets, and you can just see those shadows in these canyons between the skyscrapers. And then a glint of sun in a window. But, then these deep, dark shadows, and I can just imagine how much colder and windier it is in the labyrinth of streets.

Sarah Gerth:
So, what's curricular here?

Jacqueline Simmons:
And by that I'm thinking, Sarah, that you're asking me what kind of knowledge am I noticing in this space and how might I want to work with that knowledge? Maybe play with it, or simply think about it, or maybe share it with someone else in a way that communicates something that I'm thinking about. I can't stand in downtown Manhattan without thinking about the history of this city, because so much of the colony of New York started down here in this area. It's very densely populated area of Lower Manhattan. And so, I'm always thinking about what I know about that history, who was here, what their hopes were, how those hopes were thwarted. There's so many stories of individuals, and communities, and groups that often we just walk over. We don't really have time to pause and ask the questions about what came before us and how what is here has a history.
Before we go, I have one more curricular noticing that you commented on when we first arrived, that these bridges off in the distance, both the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, maybe even the Williamsburg Bridge out there are creating this really lovely geometric pattern against the sky. And I want to sit down and sketch it. I want to sketch it against the skyscrapers that are popping up against the ships, the ferries, and the other ships that are near it just as a series of these shapes, these geometric shapes that are so compelling. So, there's something artistic in this sensory experience that we're engaged in too. And that might even be a way into other topics. Because, it does get me to ask other kinds of questions too. But, right now, just the shapes alone and the desire to sketch them out is calling me.

Sarah Gerth:
Hey Jackie. Let's pause here and describe what happened next. We took out our field journals and pencils to sketch the scene in front of us. We sketched for about 10 minutes and then shared our drawings. You can take a look at our show notes to see what we came up with.

Jacqueline Simmons:
This could be a good prompt for listeners to pull out a piece of scrap paper or a post-it note and start scribbling. What are you seeing right now? Let's get back to the pier.
Ready?

Sarah Gerth:
Ready?

Jacqueline Simmons:
Okay, let's switch. We'll trade books and see what we were each doing. There you go.

Sarah Gerth:
There you go.

Jacqueline Simmons:
Ooh.

Sarah Gerth:
Ooh. Love the quality of the line.

Jacqueline Simmons:
Yeah, I love your lines. They're really swift. There's so much movement in your lines.

Sarah Gerth:
That surprised me because when I look at it, it's so still.

Jacqueline Simmons:
Yeah.

Sarah Gerth:
And then when I drew it, there's so much more movement than I actually feel looking at it. The more I looked at it, the more I could actually see the cars on the bridge.

Jacqueline Simmons:
Oh, yeah. I was so distracted by all of the details. The people on the pier across the way, the cars, you know how sometimes that can feel a little stressful to try to get all the details? You can't possibly get all the details.

Sarah Gerth:
And there are so many details in the scene, so many windows and all of the cables on the bridge, even the ripples of the water.

Jacqueline Simmons:
And each one has its own perfection. The cables create this beautiful pattern of its own. You could just focus on those cables and that nice string pattern it's making.

Sarah Gerth:
And you capture the pattern of the little triangle supports on the bridge that the subway is going over right now, which also has a really nice shine in the sun.

Jacqueline Simmons:
Oh, yeah. Everything is still really glittering. So, what do you think it means to pause and sketch something? What does it do for you?

Sarah Gerth:
It really slows down my noticing and it makes me think about what I'm actually noticing.

Jacqueline Simmons:
Yeah. It's such a good tool in that way because we tend to rely on our eyes, and our eyes can, as we just said, hold only so much. And the sketch asks our eyes to just slow down. "Look at me," it says, "Pay attention to me." And then all of a sudden you notice different things that want attention.

Sarah Gerth:
What's one thing you found yourself noticing or paying attention to as you were drawing that you didn't see in our general looking at the scene?

Jacqueline Simmons:
I probably wasn't as tuned into all of the buildings in the distance. I was mostly focused on the bridges, and the taller skyscrapers, and even the pier. And then when I really had sketched that out, I was left with the space behind the scene I had initially sketched, and I thought, "Oh wow, there's so much more happening back there than I had even thought to capture the first time around."

Sarah Gerth:
Yeah. I wonder how we might connect our sketching activity to the questions around knowledge that we started with.

Jacqueline Simmons:
That's a great question. It could be a really interesting way to just orient you to a space. I remember working with a teacher consultant once who said that every time she came into a classroom to observe a teacher, the first thing she did was just map out the space. And it was a messy sketch. It was like, "Door over here, X for each body." So a group of X's over here, X, X teacher in the front. And it just helped her to remember to pay attention to some key things that bodies are in proximity to window or light, or not, or bodies are cramped, or materials are available to some people, not others. And it was ever since she told me that I started doing it too. That quick sketch encouraged her to ask other questions, such as which of these bodies are of different genders? Which of these bodies are engaged, which are not? Who seems to be sitting where? It prompted her to ask more specific questions about identity or engagement.

Sarah Gerth:
That it is a practice of paying attention is important, and it's by honing that muscle and practice that we perhaps opened up the conversation.

Jacqueline Simmons:
We've been standing with a particular orientation towards the water, and now that I turn my body, I see that this pier is filled with people. That's an example of another kind of question we could have started with. We could have simply engaged with who's here. At the time when we began this conversation, we were really thinking about the place and the inanimate objects in this space, the buildings, the nature, the proximity to water. And so, that grabbed our attention. But, now that I'm turned around and I see literally hundreds of people who are commuting home, I have different kinds of questions about who they are, and what they're doing, and where they come from.

Sarah Gerth:
We've been in more or less the same 10-foot radius for the past hour.

Jacqueline Simmons:
But, strictly in the sun.

Sarah Gerth:
Strictly in the sun, only in the sun. We began looking south-ish. And then we were looking at the city for a little while, and that prompted different questions. And then we were looking north at these bridges and just each of these different angles themselves prompts so many different questions, just seeing such different scenes in each direction.

Jacqueline Simmons:
I hope that's inspiring for other folks to maybe take up a spot somewhere and do a 360 turn and see what comes up for you. What questions does it prompt for you? This has been a fun Curriculum Encounter.

Sarah Gerth:
Yeah.

MUSIC:
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Jacqueline Simmons:
So, several themes emerged on our Curriculum Encounter on the Wall Street Pier. When we talk about the conditions of arrival, I think we're also talking about what's happening in the teaching and learning encounter. And by that I mean that every learner comes into a learning space, a classroom, or even a meeting room, and you're bringing something with you. There's something on your back. And it might be an emotion, it might be a preoccupation, it might be a preoccupation with the content even. But, it's important, I think, to remember that we are all arriving with some conditions that we can pay attention to. And that might be for the teacher, and it also might be for the learner.
And I remember we did this when we were holding Curriculum Lab meetings during the pandemic, and we would start every single meeting with just a moment to sometimes it was just breathe together and look at each face in that little tiny window in the Zoom screen and consider that each of us was arriving with something sometimes emotional or sometimes a need for this collective space to commune together.

Sarah Gerth:
Yeah, that's such a nice way of thinking about that bench that we started our conversation on, and the time we gave ourselves to collect our own thoughts to settle our own bodies after our respective journeys to that pier.

Jacqueline Simmons:
And Sarah, you reminded me earlier that sometimes we don't need that. Sometimes... I remember I used to teach, I was jetting in off the bench, to take the ball. I'd like to jet into class, immediately start, and there was something about that adrenaline that was really exciting for me. Probably because I was prepping right before in my office, and there was some exciting point in a reading that I wanted to get to. And, I think, that's no longer the way I enter into classrooms. I maybe prefer a different kind of settling with my students.

Sarah Gerth:
Yeah. I'm thinking of how many teachers opening rituals for class stay the same, and how many evolve over the years of teaching. Whether it's the handshake, or a bell, or a period of reading and music, or the do nows or whatever those rituals are to arrive. And, I think, our point is that many teachers have these rituals for arriving, but how many take into account the things students are bringing with them as they come into that space, whether learning histories or just what happened that morning.

MUSIC:
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Jacqueline Simmons:
You asked me that really nice question, what's curricular here? And I'd love for you to share a little bit about how you define that question. Why did you ask that question?

Sarah Gerth:
That's a question we ask ourselves in these Curriculum Encounters. That's really what it's all about, doing this sensing, doing this observing, doing this noticing. But, to bring it back to our point, what makes us encounter a curricular one? And so, when we ask that, we're asking what kinds of knowledge are available to us? How does this help us think about the kinds of things that one could learn or does learn implicitly and explicitly in a space? And what is that doing socially, politically, ethically, aesthetically? So, it's building those curricular chops by practicing that analysis and evaluation in all of these spaces that aren't really considered classrooms.

Jacqueline Simmons:
Yeah. And we tend to look at them as not curricular. And then when we slow down, we start to see all of the knowledge within, all of the knowledge that's available to us there that we could notice. And, I think, that takes us to that phrase that we like to use, "Curricular noticings." I know I tend to look, and see, and recount what it is that I'm visually attracted to. And lately I've also been thinking about those smells and how that can impact the visual or open up a completely new box, a new set of wonderings about what is here, why, where.

Sarah Gerth:
And I think when we build this practice of curricular noticing, we're saying that curriculum designers are, in a way, anthropologists and artists. They always have these tools of observation with them. And it's not always named as such, but to encourage our students to build those capacities for noticing the possibilities for curriculum design, kinds of knowledge that could be tapped into any given space.

Jacqueline Simmons:
Another theme that we addressed was this shift in perspective. And it was really interesting to hear what happened to each of us as we stood outside of the curriculum of the pier. We were on this pier at the edge of the city, literally standing off the land on this human construction. And really just look back at the city and think about what felt close, what felt far away, what felt familiar, what felt new. And that shift in perspective can be a very embodied one. And it can also just be a reflective one, thinking about the knowledge that you may or may not consider.

Sarah Gerth:
Yeah. Those buildings that feel so big and looming when you're right next to them, when you're caught in the sounds and the smells of the sidewalk, and the street, and the subway grate, how much that receded as we stood just yards off the edge of the city on this pier and had that moment where our relationship to it shifted and we could look at that from this sort of external perspective. And how significant that is with our formal curricula and just the curricula of our everyday lives to sometimes step out of that and hold it in your palm to analyze or to reflect on what it's doing.

MUSIC:
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Jacqueline Simmons:
And so, that leads us to our field guide for this episode. One activity that we'd like you to try out is to sketch. Use your visual senses and make an artistic rendering of a place. And you might focus on something like patterns. What patterns do you notice? How do they overlap? How do they draw your attention to particular aspects of the space? Or another way in is to ask, "What is artistic in this sensory experience that I'm having?" What other kinds of questions does that bring you to? This might lead you to sketch as a curricular activity.

Sarah Gerth:
And, I think, that's so powerful when it's done in community or with a friend, because then it may be really obvious to us what we observe, or it might be obvious to me what I'm observing, but when I compare my drawing with yours, Jackie, it becomes apparent that we just naturally notice different things and are drawn to different things.

Jacqueline Simmons:
Yeah, reveals a whole other set of knowledges that are available to you both.

Sarah Gerth:
Yeah. Another activity is to shift your perspective. Just as we stood on that pier on the edges of the city, to go to a place you inhabit frequently, one that's familiar, and to find a different vantage point there. If it's your classroom, maybe you sit in the student's seat, or you teach from the rear of the classroom, or if your classroom has a window, you look in from the outside and see what's new, what you notice from that vantage point. You might also be doing this not in a classroom, or you might not be a classroom teacher, but there's so much in shifting your perspective to a usual space.

Jacqueline Simmons:
And there can be so much to keeping a field journal so that you can jot down notes about what you are seeing, hearing, thinking, putting some words to that perspective to live alongside your sketches, gives you a record, something to reflect on, something to share with someone else later. And then, you have it available to you to impact your practice later on. Curriculum Encounters is a part of the DFI podcast network at Teachers College Columbia University. It was edited by Sarah Gerth and Jackie Simmons. Studio Recordings are engineered by Billy Collins and Abu Abdelbagi. Website and social media support is by Abu Abdelbagi and Madeleine McGee Stillman. Our theme music is designed by Noah Teachy. Listen to episodes of this podcast on our website or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have comments, email us at curriculumencounters.tc.edu. And check out Pop & Play, a podcast about play and popular culture by our colleagues, Haeny Yoon and Nathan Holbert.