Episode 2

Jacqueline Simmons:

Welcome to Curriculum Encounters, a podcast about exploring knowledge wherever you find it.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And thinking about what kind of knowledge matters for teaching and designing curriculum. I am Sarah Gerth van den Berg.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

And my name is Jackie Simmons. I'm a lecturer from the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Columbia University's Teachers College and we're both experts in curriculum design and we love to study questions about where knowledge comes from.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

This episode is for educators who have thought maybe about classroom design, but not quite how the aesthetics of the spaces where you teach and learn matter for the knowledge and learning that's happening there.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

And Teachers College is a learning environment, we're starting our exploration right here at home.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

If you're listening from beyond Teachers College, we hope you'll consider how these encounters might look in your own learning environment.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

And stay tuned for future seasons when we have Curriculum Encounters in other kinds of spaces.

 

This episode, we're looking at aesthetic choices made here at Teachers College, and that means we're looking really closely at all of those details. We're going to ask you in this episode to pay particular attention to what it looks like, what it feels like, how it sounds, how do all of those aesthetic elements orient you towards learning, towards the relationships that you develop there towards the knowledge that may be shared in those spaces.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Come with us to two different kinds of spaces at Teachers College and unpack what aesthetic elements and choices are and how they matter and what else we might be able to do.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Hi Sarah.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Hi, Jackie. We're in Grace Dodge, fifth floor. I forget which room exactly.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

It's one of the newly renovated classrooms at Teachers College. We chose this classroom because of the design choices that were made in this renovation. There are so many textures going on in this room right now.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

They're shiny textures like these are the whiteboard tables, whiteboard walls, everything's got this high-tech gloss.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

They've turned these windows into seats with this wood paneling that really takes advantage of the interesting architecture of the windows at the top of the building.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

The nook is so alluring and it feels like a throwback to this old academia with dark paneled wood and the little nook in the window.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

And there's also this modern polish to it, which matches the shiny high-gloss whiteboard tables and this blue executive carpeting, there's two monitors, two pull-down screens, and then this blue cushioned, what would you call it?

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Honeycomb-shaped foam pieces that protrude from the wall a little bit. It's for sound quality or something. I really want to touch them.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

I'm touching them now and they're like firm squishes how I describe it. We've got this high-tech meets tradition and a lot of technology. All of the new classrooms here at TC are being outfitted with media consoles built into the room. It's all built into the walls, the wiring, the cameras, the projectors, the audio.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And so much of that infrastructure is invisible.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Interesting to think about all of those choices being a part of a room design, but then also having this incredible impact on the teaching and the learning that happens here. We've recounted many things about the learning environment, and we're in these spaces at TC to just really ask this question over and over again about the knowledge that it speaks to. What's happening here, what did we just do by dissecting the environment and what space this is and what it's intended to do, what's curricular here?

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

I'm thinking about what it feels like to be a learner in these spaces and how one's orientation to learning might be a little different here suddenly versus the traditional classrooms. This feels very much like a particular kind of leadership is cultivated.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

And that seems to avoid other questions about learning the content or how am I accessing that in other ways besides this tech-enabled environment?

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

What message this room is sending, what kinds of changes are possible or have already happened? This feeling that you're learning in the future has such a particular valence in conversations about schooling and knowledge and curriculum.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Let's go to a different space at TC. We're going to the third floor of Zankel building.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

This is the home for the curriculum and teaching department. It has that old TC feel. The floorboards are so worn down. There's wooden paneling or wainscotting that comes to about the height of my face. That must be four and a half feet or so of wainscotting, and I was thinking about the wood paneling in the Grace Dodge room is shiny and glossy and this is waxy. There's a sense of accumulated wear and care for this wood.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

It's interesting to think about other things here. There's this one table and it's right across from the case where defended proposal titles and the names of completed dissertations. Sarah, your name's still up there. That's great. I think it's interesting that this hallway is primarily used to draw attention to who belongs here. There are the doctoral students and then there's the faculty name board with the names of the department chair, the director of academic affairs, the staff, the faculty, the full-time lecturers, and then the other bulletin board has pictures and names and titles of Master of Education projects. It's just interesting use of public space to really highlight and name who we are. There's so many things you could do with the bulletin board.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

These other bulletin boards have the Hollingworth Preschool and Hollingworth Science Camp, lots of colors, the only space that suggests young children are present for a part of the work here.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

And then the elementary inclusive education bulletin board seems to be in progress, but they do have a map showing all of the partner schools where student teachers have been placed. And then finally the Black Paint Curriculum Lab has some flyers and artifacts.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Artifacts. This is notable not just because a space that means a lot to both of us, but there's so much texture and material on it. There's yarn wrapped and crocheted, all kinds of, like, thingamabobs and laser cut wood and dried out clay and weird and random little sculptures. There's paper books.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

There are a couple of prompts. Not really though. It's more of a display rather than an invitation.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

It feels archival as does a lot of the other bulletin boards.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

And also whatever we want to indicate about teaching and learning has already happened. It's already in some kind of finished state.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

I think that helps me articulate what I was thinking about the future orientation of that other classroom. And this has the sense that what's happened has happened and you're going to go back and it'll always look like that. Everything feels, like, a little bit harder to change, for better or worse.

 

Jackie, we visited these spaces and now we get to talk about what we were doing there and what this conversation is about.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

I think we were doing a little bit of curricular work. We were paying attention to not just what the spaces looked like or how they made us feel, but really what potential was there for them. What knowledge did these observations lead us to as we thought about each space as an academic space at Teachers College?

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

You called this curriculum work, which I love and I imagine a listener might be thinking, "But you haven't talked about any curriculum. What's being learned in these spaces? What course meets there?" I just want to name that when we say we're doing curriculum work, we actually want to draw folks in with us to a conversation around the other kinds of knowledge at work in these spaces. And here as you talked about, we're attending to the qualities of a space, the design choices, what we're calling aesthetics. And that might be the lighting, the color, the textures, those design choices and design elements, the qualities of a space that have an effect on us and through which we are learning something before we've even been introduced to the formal knowledge that might take place here.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

I think it's always easy to just reference back to the kinds of learning spaces that we're familiar with, that you walk into a classroom and you see a whiteboard or a blackboard at one end of the room and then a series, a row of desks or tables and chairs in front of that blackboard. It automatically communicates a certain kind of learning is happening. And while that might be useful for certain kinds of content, it doesn't always work for the things that we want to be able to teach or the topics or interests that our students have.

 

How do we start to reimagine that? I think that's why this is such a valuable exercise because when we talk about possibilities and potentials, we're really talking about futures. We're really talking about what could possibly be the classrooms of the future, the learning spaces of the future. I almost don't even want to say classrooms because even to suggest that they have to take place in a room is already confining. I think tapping into this time to let these noticings move us in some way can be valuable for any educator or learner who wants to just expand those possibilities and potentials.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And I think a lot of educators do already care a lot about what we're calling an aesthetic knowledge without maybe naming it as such. And I don't know that everyone values it, or maybe you could feel like, "I care about this. I'm putting so much time into thinking about how my classroom looks or how my learning space looks. I want plants or I'm thinking about the posters, the cozy chairs and how all of that feels." And we're saying, "That's great. That's really important. It's part of learning, it's part of this curriculum work."

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

The two spaces are great examples. We looked at the newly designed classroom with the slick wood grain and the puffy walls and the new technology and the big windows, and those were intentionally designed and it's clear that the makers of that learning space really cares about the experience that a Teachers College student would have in such a carefully constructed high-tech room. It's really different from the old TC classroom, which at that time was also probably designed to be at the cutting edge of technology. And yet there's still something about it that is constrained. As much as it speaks to this wonderful possibility, the tables are always situated in the typical layout of a lecture hall or a seminar room, and the controls for the technology are always within reach of the instructor, but really no one else. Those are all saying things too about what the motive might've been.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

We thought about that new Grace Dodge classroom as one where somebody cared and thought about the experience of the student there. And it may be important to also think about the old classroom that even in the old, there's an element of this care work that goes into the aesthetics of that space, the feel of that space.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

I think the word care is important to us here because we want to invite people, teachers, learners, of all types into this analytic work. It's not just intended to criticize, it's intended to open. It's intended to say, "Wait, how else might this be? And are there some opportunities to really rethink the kinds of experiences that might happen with this knowledge that I want to teach?" I think when I teach in classrooms of all kinds, "What's possible here?" And the possibilities are usually dictated by what is around me. This idea that we might open up our senses in a different way, that we might allow ourselves to be drawn to the space, some newness could come in. I don't have to be limited by what's always been there. Just taking this time to see different kinds of opportunities might actually allow me to use the very same spaces that I always have, but just in different ways.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

I'd love to go into an example of that by talking about the unusual window nooks where maybe old eaves were, and they felt like the kinds of nooks you would read in as a kid. And there's that sense of imagination that sparked there where I don't know how often reading in the window nook happens in the classes and courses that take place there, but how lovely if it did, or we let more of that imagining and memory into a space through what these qualities spark for us and evoke for us.

 

And I am thinking about interventions in the spaces we've been in that might prompt someone to attune to how the aesthetics are working or what they're imagining in a space. Maybe by those window nooks, we plant little signs that say, "Read here," or prompt folks to do something they might not do in a particular space and think about how that affects them. Or we get a lot of bean bags for the hallway and we plant these bean bags around as reading corners in spaces where people are usually just moving through.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

I often see a lot more students than I used to actually using the hallways as workspace. Just this past week, I saw some hour before the five o'clock class where every single table was taken, and so many of the chairs that are spread out through the hallways were being used as study areas. Intuitively, I think people understand that the hallways are academic spaces. They're teaching and learning spaces.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And what if we designed them even more intentionally as these study halls or workspaces? There's a low, empty bookshelf on that hallway, and what if we filled it with study hall props, like a warm lamp and a plant and a photo frame, and people could be invited to take these props and populate it on the tables as they're working to make it feel like their desk at home or make it feel like a study hall space and then put it all back. And whoever uses that table next might set up their desk differently.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

That's a nice idea. Make your own desk situation. And also something that we did in both of our walks around campus is really just tune into the senses. Sometimes we just needed to remind it to stop and do that. Signs that literally say, "Stop, what do you smell?" Or, "Pause here and listen," or, "Touch this wall." I think it would be really interesting to see how those kinds of interruptions change people's relationship to the space, to TC particularly because it always seems very playful. Playful interruptions might create a different sense of community too. It might filter into classrooms and how people relate to each other, how professors relate to students vice versa.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

I'm trying to imagine an activity that helps people become more aware of how these design choices aren't necessarily givens. For example, the color of the wall feels like such a given. It's this neutral ivory color you see everywhere. What if we had a bunch of paint swatches and said, "TC is repainting this hallway. What color do you vote for?" As this imaginary campaign that exercises one that might have people slow down and say, "Wait a sec, what if this wall was mauve or brick red or sky blue? How would I feel? How might that be different? What do I want for myself? What do other people want?"

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

It almost seems as if this is a fantasy of redesigning Teachers College for our own personal interests and benefits. But I'm thinking it's one of the reasons why I value a flexible base where you can redesign it every time you teach a new lesson. And it never feels boring. It always seems like because we can move our bodies differently than somehow the learning feels fresh and exciting. And maybe that would get tired and old, but not right now.

 

It really does have an impact. My engagement can look different. My interest and motivation can look different. And there are, of course, schools that are able to do that. It always seems like it requires extra funding, but maybe a lot of times we're talking about just removing the assumptions behind things and letting that be a way to reimagine curricular space.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

I'm glad you said that because I think it helps come back to this point we're making that through the aesthetics of a space, these design choices, learning has sort of been primed and is happening already. The sense of malleability and flexibility affords so much potential and possibility, whereas usually those choices feel so fixed and so given as the backdrop and background you have to work with and imagine around.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

To recap, three big ideas that we've hit on in doing this curriculum analysis is to, one, pay attention. Observe the qualities of a space. Two, take the time to really let that settle, prepare your body and mind to let those observations move you into a different assessment of what's happening here. And three, let that lead you to think about some possibilities, potentials, and maybe constraints that could lead you to different choices.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And we hope listeners take up this invitation to play with those aesthetics of a space that you're in.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

The Black Paint Curriculum Lab is a research and design space housed within the Department of Curriculum and Teaching and Digital Futures Institute at Teachers College. It was developed to theorize curriculum-making practices in a wide range of contexts and for diverse populations.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

It was developed as a space to think creatively and expansively about curriculum inside the classroom, outside of the classroom with all kinds of learners and content areas and kinds of knowledge.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Throughout the season of episodes, we'll be looking at knowledge as it occurs at Teachers College in all kinds of spaces by looking at aesthetic choices, sensory inquiry and materiality.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Curriculum Encounters is a production of The Digital Futures Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University. It was edited by Jen Lee and the both of us. Our theme music is designed by Noah Teachey. 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.