Episode 3

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

We are entering the library stacks.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Gosh, the smell, it's unmistakable. We cannot confuse it for anything other than book.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

The smell evokes such strong memories for me as a kid who spent years with my nose in the middle of a book.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah, I can relate.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

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.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And I'm Sarah Gerth van den Berg and we both teach in the Department of Curriculum and teaching at Columbia University's Teachers College. We consider ourselves experts in curriculum design and we love to study questions about curriculum.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

This episode is for teachers and learners who have a hunch that memories and emotions matter, and wish there were more opportunities to explore why that is. We're going on a journey through hidden and forgotten spaces at TC to see what histories and feelings arise for us and think together about what happens when we bring those into the formal curriculum or what happens when we leave them out.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

In this episode, we're looking at hidden spaces and materials here at Teachers College.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

By hidden, we're thinking about the kinds of spaces that have literally been lost or covered up or forgotten, and when we start to find them again, they tell us something about what curriculum was intended in the past. Let's head back into the library and consider how these hidden spaces matter.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And see if you can start to notice them in your own context.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

So as we walk through the stacks, we see really narrow windows on one side of the space and by the windows there are three small cafe tables with library chairs. I also noticed that there's a little door here. Let's see if it opens. It opens. It opens. I know. I wonder why it's here. An unused closet. It's not even a storage space for cleaning supplies. It looks like somebody just shoved stuff in there.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Yeah, it's really just the forgotten stuff. Do you have any good memories, Jackie, of closets and classrooms and the stuff left behind?

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

My very first public school teaching job, I had a weekend to prepare and then on Monday morning I entered into the classroom of a fifty-year veteran teacher and all of her stuff, and I was a first-year teacher and I had no stuff. It was so much to deal with because it was textbooks from 1970, it was so many boxes and files of student work, and it was really overwhelming. So I don't like cluttered classrooms as a result. I think that really scared me off. Even old books, I sort of got to a place where they didn't seem that useful because they were so out of date and irrelevant to the student population at the time.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

I wonder how that sense of out-of-date-ness affects what students decide to do. I remember writing my undergraduate thesis and loving it, but writing it next to all these books that I had the sense that nobody opened and would it just become another one? And it really affected what I chose to do. I chose to teach instead. Those memories matter, even if I'm very attached to these materials. We're on the fourth floor of Thompson.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Oh, this space is so great because at first glance, it just looks like a series of very modern-ish offices, and then you start to see as you walk into the center that it's the old Teachers College gymnasium. So the ceiling is very tall. If you look up, you'll see that there's actually a track that runs the perimeter of the room, and there are these beautiful steel beams holding up the track.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

The flooring instantly makes me think of gym class, this laminated wood paneling where your shoes would scuff if you slid really fast.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

That squeaking sound when your sneakers hit against it. And then a beautiful spiral staircase.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

It looks like we might be able to go up.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Wow. So now we're above the office space and we can really see what the top of this gymnasium used to look like.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

There's a dusty wooden track in a ring around the perimeter of this whole room, and it's recognizable immediately as a track because of the way the outside lane is longer than the inside lane, and it feels like you might even fall in to the middle of the room if it weren't for these old metal railings.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

And they're so decorative and quite beautiful. This little flower motif that repeats across every single panel.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

That decorative piece to the railing feels kind of incongruous for a gym and a track.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

I'm so glad they kept the track and that they didn't tear it down. They clearly needed the space for other things. I really appreciate that they left this rather than remaking the entire space because it is a piece of history that deserves to be kept at least, even if it's hidden.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

This repurposing of spaces is a curriculum unto itself that is the story of spaces in a packed city where space is always being repurposed. Even in schools that our teachers and students are in now, the kind of constant reinvention and repurposing of what had been there before.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Sarah, have you ever noticed this?

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

I've never noticed this. We turned the corner. Wow.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Behind the sliding door is a lot of electronic wiring, computer cables.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And this sort of sweet musty smell wafted out.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Once you start opening your eyes to the hidden things, you start seeing them everywhere. And we're coming to a place that houses the Teachers College pool. The lockers are still here, and the pool is no longer accessible to the public or to the Teachers College community. So it's really rare to be able to see it. And in fact, it looks like it's locked.

 

So being down here in this part of the basement, it used to be obvious that there was a swimming pool because of the smell. You could always smell the chlorine. But now I don't smell that at all, which makes me think that this has probably been completely removed as a working pool.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

You would have no sense literally that it is here other than a small plaque on the door that says pool. I am thinking about where and how things can be tucked away in what's one city block of space, how labyrinthine the building is and what a maze these little hallways are, and this sort of trick of space that things can be hidden away, forgotten about.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah. I think that must happen frequently with old spaces where the intended purpose of something gets lost or replaced. Even here, stopping in an innocent metal panel that's been painted white, but then you can see behind it almost looks like old phone lines. Nobody needs that anymore. Let's just cover it up.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

I'm thinking of how often formal curriculum can feel like that accumulation of all of these old standards and activities and purposes and books that were new or shiny or useful at one point and now they can be overwhelming how many things have been written over, packed together. The desire to sort of wipe the plate clean and start over and get a sense of honoring or living with the histories good and bad of all of this other material.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

That's a really great curricular point. It makes me sad because on the one hand, we feel something about what came before. We're tied to it because of our own experience with it, because of our own joy sometimes having engaged with that material. So we continue to see it as important. And then it's also sad that sometimes that nostalgia doesn't make room for new ideas to emerge and it gets in our way. It can make us stuck.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And how the nostalgia can mask the more complicated feelings, the overwhelm of the teacher's closet spilling over with decades of stuff that the new teacher has to figure out how to navigate through.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

So here we are back in this office. What's special about this office is that it is the office of our mentor. And so that means it holds a lot of memory for both of us of extended conversations, just the kind of feeling that you carry with you into a meeting. When you have a meeting with your advisor, your mentor, you're holding all of this emotion. It could be tension, excitement, guilt, fear, joy, so many different kinds of feelings. And then you bring them with you into a space and then they work their way into your relationship, into your conversation, into your dialogue. And that's what this office holds, I think.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And this room, it's always felt very spacious to me. The ceilings are high, the window is large, and lets in a lot of light. And I think that's significant because conversations here always felt spacious and there was room to wander and room and time for the conversation to unfold. And that, to me, was the most precious quality of my learning experiences in this space.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Sarah, we were just doing a really interesting kind of curriculum work. We visited hidden spaces and talked about their histories and our memories. What are you thinking about right now?

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Something I'm struck by as we visited these hidden spaces is the accumulation of past purposes and how that impacts what we do with the space today. Thinking about old curricular decisions and standards in a way, sort of the ghosts of a space or of formal curricular documents that are still lingering in our learning environments today and the curriculum we use today and how much we acknowledge it, how much we're intentional with its presence and what impact it has.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah, we all have our bag of tricks that we've been accumulating over however many years of being an educator. It could be our favorite activities or some way of designing a room, and that's a point of pride for really experienced teachers. And yet you're talking about how that can sometimes operate as its own curriculum, these ways of doing things that may actually have an impact on what we think is possible in this moment. There are these pros and cons of that. We are so delighted to have something to rely on, and yet it can also feel like it could get in the way of reimagining other ways of responding to education or life in this current moment.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And if we go back and revisit some of the spaces with the old gym and the track, they made the decision to preserve elements of what that space had been, the flooring, these high ceilings and rafters, the track around the upper half of the room, and to repurpose that space and build these offices so that the current faculty and instructors and centers could thrive there.

 

And with the pool, they've made this decision just to close it. It's not repurposed yet, nor is it operational. And so it defers this responsibility. You still need to do something with the ghost or with this old layer and this history so that it can serve or open up new possibilities for the current learners and populations.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah, as you said before, it's like the commitment has not been made yet to figure out what purpose it shall serve. So let's just lock it away for now.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

What do we do with all of this if we're planning curriculum?

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

One activity might be for people to find a ghost or a past layer in some aspect of their own curriculum or learning environment and identify what it is. A whisper of what it used to do? What is its impact? And think about do you want it to be there? Is it doing what you want it to do? Maybe can it do something else that might serve you better?

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And is it there because it's important to other people who have relationships to this body of knowledge or this curriculum or learning community? And if so, maybe some of those are valid, but parsing out what that ghost in the curriculum is doing.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

And as we talked about, sometimes the ghost is about feeling. If we think really about ghosts and hauntings, they're usually associated with fear, but also sometimes in some cultures with a kinship with the past, a revisiting that's very warm and welcoming. It's interesting to think about the emotional ties to the past and maybe recognizing that layer of the past is welcome, but it adds some kind of joy to what you're doing. And just the recognition of it can be re-validated or incorporated back in in a way that acknowledges its presence.

 

I'm thinking specifically about sometimes you do find old books and they are really such treats, they're really important ways of understanding what came before, and you don't want to discard those. You really want to preserve them and include them in how you're thinking about something.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

That reminds me of one of my favorite books as a middle schooler, Esperanza Rising. When I was a first-year teacher, I was so delighted that it was still in the curriculum at a totally different school, totally different city. And now we're working with a group of teacher fellows in their master's programs in education, and the school they're working with is still reading that book. Maybe it'll be time to move on and there are other important books, but what you're saying about what those memories do for us, those affinities and identifications and enduring ties to something.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah, I have this collection of old school stuff. Have you ever seen my box of?

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

I've seen a peek of your box.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

It's a metal file box that used to be a card catalog. Okay, so on top of this box is a scale, and this is the kind of scale where you need weights on one side so that you can properly measure and here's this metal box.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Oh my gosh, the smell.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

I had to have these sample number two pencils never sharpened, of course.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Perfect erasers.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

I will never use those. They're really just historical samples. I like this box of fuel-plated thumb tacks. I knew an artist who did work with thumb tacks and just made these patterns with these. I think that's an example of how some of these things might be repurposed in clever ways.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Maybe that's another prompt for listeners is to create this capsule box of your own and what do you choose to put in that? What memories do you choose to keep there? What are those memories doing for you?

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah, I get so much pleasure out of my time capsule. I don't intend to use any of those things. I don't find them to be necessary educational tools, but I do like the activity of remembering. Think about using.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

I think it is important that memories have a designated space. So then maybe we can relate to the memory differently or honor the memory and say, we can also make space to do other things in our teaching practice because we've honored the memory and given it its own sort of space in this time capsule.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

So Sarah, this has been a really fun walk down memory lane. Some of our own personal memories, but also maybe Teachers College memories, right? If this building could talk, it would have so many memories and maybe even its own feelings about the many waves of education and iterations of students and teachers who've come here before.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

We teach that curriculum is a social creation. So maybe what we are highlighting here is the way that curriculum analysis is inflected by our personal identities and histories, but that there's important work done when it's in collaboration and in relationship and when it becomes this social creation.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah, that's so great. Let's pick up on that in our next episode. Can't wait.

 

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.