A b e c e d a r i a n

As a teacher, she would lead expeditionary-like squadrons of 7's and 8's through the streets of Greenwich Village. All of Manhattan west of 14th Street was her classroom. The fields for investigation lie around us everywhere. She called it human work. She was in many ways our first environmental educator. The study of relationships was at the core of her calling. She lived out Dewey in a more lyrical and protean way. The here and the now of children's lives. It was said she was seen at least weekly with students at the meat packing markets behind Washington Street. Her kids collecting stories and interviews. They were map makers and ethnographers collecting what she called primary sources: the details and textures of her children's lives. In every season she'd take her class to the docks and piers below Horatio Street to observe boat traffic, collect data on the Hudson River. On clear days you could see the Statue of Liberty and see schools of sea bass heading north to Albany. On brisk March days full of white caps the river smells were like her childhood. The classroom was both studio and a lab. The data you collected was what you reassembled in the classroom. Her constructivism was radical in 1934 as it is at the end of the 20th Century.

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(classroom picture)

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Human Work! It lies around children everywhere. ...In and out of their homes. Let them share it dramatically, practically as investigators, as participators. Let our young Geographers investigate and map the world they live in.

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The interior of her school was like a museum. The walls were decorated with massive brown butcher block scrolls inscribed with detailed murals of the bridges and roads and neighborhoods of New York. Show me what's on the walls of a school and I'll tell you what kind of learning is going on, she'd say.

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Content...is discovered, used, related through...experience, [not] textbooks.

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She would tell her colleagues: Children's most natural states are while playing and thinking. Keep feeding them with source material...provide them with tools for discovering relations, tools for making their images active. School was a place for thinking and for play. A place where habits of mind and work would be developed.

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Her philosophy of education would not be as knotty or opaque as Dewey's. In her reading of the world she was his sister, taking 'the continuum of experience' into the lives of public school children, in New York City, 1934. Geography was the metaphor. Her classrooms were like galleries, filled with exhibitions and displays of elaborate roads, cities, villages, all kinds of human habitations constructed out of blocks.

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She pleaded with teachers to hunt with their children for source materials. The community was the place to collect and gather information and artifacts about the world. It could be an interview with a firefighter or a recipe of your grandmother. It was all data. All "human work". Like her colleague across the park at the Museum of Natural History, Margaret Mead, she was an ethnographer, and saw that as a key principle of learning for all children in their stages of development.

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Her students became travelers. She would take them on almost a daily basis to observe and collect data on bridges, streets, roadways and buildings of the west village. She called them: Geographic explorations, adventures of finding ever-new relations in one's... environment. She would call it the environmental approach.

 

(Lucy in front of map)

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In the year she took off from teaching she went to work for the American Geographic Society. She took it upon herself to do a study of Long Island City. For months, she walked, collecting the names of streets and avenues, walked across meadows full of chickweed and dandelions, around the dumping grounds under the Queensboro Bridge, along the shore of the East River, with a box of colored pencils hanging around her neck and maps in her bag. Always maps. She would take Photostats of real-estate maps and color code them with all kinds of buildings in the neighborhood: industrial buildings, stores, public utilities, residences: individual houses, two family houses, and apartment houses with stores over them. Over these maps she would superimpose transparent ones of population compiled from census reports, maps of earlier neighborhoods and settlements, road maps, maps of natural geographic features -- wetlands, hills, beaches. She would hunt down primary resources, just as she would practice with her students and enjoin her teachers to do inventing ways for children to work out basic geographic relationships. She wanted children rooted in their world through understanding the earth and their relationships to it: what the earth does to people and what people do to the earth. When she finished the study of Long Island City, she was convinced of what she believed all along: that personal engagement and the image of competence was as critical for learning as the mastery of any fact.

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The issue of curriculum had little to do with standards. It was about the inventiveness of teaching; keeping alive the bouncing ball of self growth and intellectual curiosity:

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She who would base their program on the exploration of the environment - must explore the environment itself. Must know how her community keeps house, from how it gets its water to how it prepares its food.

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Maxine Greene, Lillian Weber and Deborah Meier would also believe that teachers' intellectual lives are fundamental to their teaching lives. You can't inspire students without being inspired. They must be geographers themselves...experimenters...hunting for sources and studying relationships; exploring their environment... analyzing the culture of which they are a part...they must think, they must play...they must above all live in the world....

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Classrooms were never static places. They were laboratory / studio. The function of teaching was not to gather information as an encyclopedia, but to create opportunities for children to use the environment as a laboratory. Imparting information never stopped but only as an enrichment to children's firsthand investigations. Adults had to make available the media in which children found their most fluent expression: blocks, painting, clay, dramatic play. Invent tools for discovering relations; tools for making their images active. She would have taken to multimedia with a passion.

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Her genius lay in her generosity and her curiosity: create the opportunities for children to discover the world about them -- grasp ideas, perceive relationships, take the long leap into new ideas and more complex relationships. The heart of her philosophy was in the question she would constantly raise: Do children learn more by thinking or by being trained?The experimental school of the 30's would become the charter and magnate schools at the end of the 20th Century .

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Learning has nothing to do with the giving back of facts just as they are found. It is using facts; not merely knowing them. ...It is an active, dynamic, creative...process. She was a constructivist in her vision of children as geographers, in learning as an active pursuit of making sense of the world. Growth, which is at the heart of education, is from the outset about the active process of discovering relationships. She called her experiment the Bank Street Laboratory School. It was conceived essentially as a laboratory where such discoveries are made All thinking is seeing relations. Knowledge was centrifugal, like the veins of a leaf, how everything emanates from the center onto ever widening and more elaborate ideas and experiences.

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Just before she died, she said that if she was at the beginning of her career instead of at the end, she'd enlarge her study of human geography to include human ecology: the entire earth was our habitat.

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She practiced allegiance to the sanctity of experience; to the lives of children and the place of relationships; to their expansive sense of justice; to expressiveness and play; that her progeny Kohl and Meier and Dennison would affirm in their own experiments 30 years later in the public schools of New York City. Teaching was an endeavor about love and not training. What was central was the full use of human faculties. Let our young geographers investigate and map the world they live in.

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She would play Debussy and Satie in her classroom. Not because the poor needed to be exposed to Art but because the music had the effect of water, it filled the space of corridors and classrooms in ways that made them buoyant and full of light. She reveled in her trips to farmers' markets, piers, factories, anywhere human work or commerce took place, so that children could begin to unravel the complexities of the adult world and begin to understand its influence on the lives of people.

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For five cents in the 1940s she would take her classes on the #6 train to visit Hunt's Point Market in the South Bronx to see how food was delivered and stored, bought and sold. The trip to the market was like seeing a Degas: the simplicity and smells, the colors and shapes of fruit and produce from the farms of Dutchess and Putnam Counties. Later, she would take them to a delicatessen near Yankee Stadium where they had pickles on the table thick as silver dollars. Eating frankfurters thick as textbooks, they would learn about the science of pickling.