Curriculum Is Everywhere with Curriculum Encounters

Haeny Yoon:

Welcome to Pop-Off, a little spin-off segment from Pop and Play where we take a few minutes to chat about education, play, and pop culture as it is happening in the public conversation. I'm your host, Haeny Yoon, and with me as always is-

 

Nathan Holbert:

Me.

 

Haeny Yoon:

What's your name?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Oh, yeah, Nathan Holbert. Pop-Offs are a little bit of episodes we've been doing every few weeks as we spin up for season five of Pop and Play, which we are excited to announce will be dropping March 11th.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Woo.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Woo. Get ready. It's exciting. It's happening.

 

Haeny Yoon:

All right. Today, we've got with us the host of a new DFI-produced podcast called Curriculum Encounters. Okay.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Is that your theme song?

 

Haeny Yoon:

No.

 

Nathan Holbert:

No?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Not even close.

 

Nathan Holbert:

We are available for hire though if you would like us to write and perform your theme song?

 

Haeny Yoon:

I was trying to do an X-Files situation, because Curriculum Encounters reminded me of that. You see what I'm doing here?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's good.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, anyway, nobody cares.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Should we take another shot at it then?

 

Haeny Yoon:

No.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Okay.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Okay, so we have Jackie Simmons.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Hello.

 

Haeny Yoon:

And we have Sarah Gerth van den Berg.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Hello.

 

Haeny Yoon:

They also direct the Black Paint Curriculum Lab here at Teachers College.

 

Nathan Holbert:

After we get into the song, which we've already done, and before we get into the deep discussion, I wonder if you guys could say a little bit about Black Paint, and how you got to the point of starting this podcast.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Sure. Well, thanks for having us first of all. Black Paint Curriculum Lab is a really fun space in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching here at Teachers College. And I started this with Nancy Lesko, who is a professor here. And we always were talking about the way that conversations about curriculum, the creative conversations about curriculum making, and curriculum design, and theorizing always ended after class. And there was no way to really continue to play with those ideas. And we thought a lab environment would be a nice space to do that with students and faculty. And so, we go on field trips, and go to museums, and look at art, and wander around public spaces so that we can think about the knowledge that's there, and what it means for curriculum making, and what it might mean for learners and teachers.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Basically, the idea that learning happens outside of the classroom?

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

We have this tagline, learning happens everywhere, and people are really suspicious of that notion, so we don't really say it too often, in fact.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That's because you keep whispering at places like wearing a trench coat and glasses.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

And they're like, "What are you talking about? Learning happens at schools."

 

Haeny Yoon:

I like that. Sarah, can you tell us how the podcast came to be?

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

It really came out of that learning happens everywhere, and we were like, well, why just have the lab confined to a space on campus, or to a time where only a couple folks can make it or come? We wanted to bring those conversations around campus, outside of campus, and make it possible for other people to join.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah. Well, so I want to go back to this skepticism of the idea that learning happens everywhere. Let's pretend I am one of those skeptical people, which I'm not. But, if we pretend, what would you say to me? Number one, why do you think people are skeptical that learning happens in other places besides schools? And then, how do you help them understand what that looks like?

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Well, I think one of the reasons people are skeptical is because we're talking about knowledge, when we're talking about learning, what is it that we are trying to learn? Knowledge, behavior, skills, and I think a lot of people like to control that, to specific places where the decisions maybe have already been made by teachers, agreed upon by experts. And so, therefore, the suspicion is always when other people get a say, and not knowing where those other people might land, what selections they might make. I think that's the root of the suspicion, really makes things structured and a little boring.

 

Nathan Holbert:

This idea of control and the fear of who has control over the knowledge is-

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah, yeah. And then, what was your second question again?

 

Nathan Holbert:

How would you convince me-

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

How would I convince you otherwise?

 

Nathan Holbert:

... that there is lots of rich, and interesting, and exciting learning happening outside schools?

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Honestly, I would take you for a walk. I think that's what Sarah and I do. We just go for a walk, and we open our eyes, and we're just naturally curious people, right? We did this the other day. We had a meeting, and neither of us really wanted to get to our agenda. And so, we just went for a walk around campus, and it ended up being a really rich experience.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

We stumbled upon this pop-up museum on the fourth floor that I had never seen-

 

Haeny Yoon:

In this building?

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

... of this building, right-

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh, a discovery.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, okay.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

... and we just went on this walk.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And it sparked this whole exploration and consideration of what would you put in a museum? What would we take from the museum, this exchange. It propelled the rest of our meeting. Now, you might not find a pop-up museum every time you go for a walk, but I think approaching walks with that expectation makes them a lot more fun, and opens you up to what are we learning as we go? What are we collecting in a sense?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, I totally agree with that, because I feel like when I'm walking to my destination and with a purpose, I hardly notice anything around me. But, if I'm walking with a different purpose, I actually see a lot of things that I probably wouldn't have noticed before. I probably wouldn't have noticed the pop-up museum on the fourth floor because I'm like, I got to get to class.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah, well that's because the purpose was there, so if you take away the intention, and you're open to the unintentional, I think that's where the real opportunity is. And that's what I think we're trying to encourage, maybe educate people in lab to do, is just to be a little more open, be a little more wide open to the possibilities that are really right there. But, we stay close to them.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And I think that notion of purpose is related back to the skepticism that learning happens everywhere, and a little bit of that might be the desire to control what kind of learning happens, but also such a narrow sense of purpose in traditional classrooms with lots of reasons for that. But, if we can expand that purpose outside of the classroom, maybe we could also come back to the classroom with some more possibility.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

And I was just going to say, the role models, the people who do this naturally are children, right? They're always running around, like what's this? What's that? Oh, look at that. Oh, let me go back to the other thing, right? There's this a little bit of openness there until it gets trained out of them. And I also think artists and creative people keep that alive, they keep that honed, that you can really just be curious and wide open as you're moving through spaces in conversations with other people.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Okay, so I have this hypothesis or theory actually now that I'm asking this, but that's a perfect segue to a pop-off, right? And so, we wanted to think with you about, we both got to listen to your delightful trailer to Curriculum Encounters. And one of the things that resonated with me is this idea that curriculum is almost automatically assumed to only be existing in schools, right? And I think we've touched on that in the first few minutes here. But, why do you think that is? Why do you think that has come to be, because I feel like that is actually a very natural tendency, right, that when we hear the word curriculum, we automatically think schools. Why do you think that is?

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

It's such a stodgy word. It has so many syllables, so many syllables.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

People don't know how to say it. They're like, "Wait, do you mean one curriculum?"

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

The textbook, the syllables.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Isn't it Latin? Shouldn't we be saying curricula. I get so many questions, yeah.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

[inaudible 00:08:03], whatever? Yeah.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

That's part of it.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And for sure, the curriculum includes those formal documents, but we also talk a lot in our classes about how curriculum includes these informal elements, how it's enacted, and then you start to see it everywhere. And I think a approachable example is just families and what you learn from your mom, or aunties, or grandma in the kitchen as a curriculum that happens intergenerationally in the home. Maybe the recipes were written down, but there's so many other kinds of knowledge exchange there, this other course of study. Thinking about those as curricular moments and encounters.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Now, I've got like 17,000 questions I want to ask. Let me try to zoom in on one or two. That leads to a vision of curriculum that is sometimes a designed artifact. Sometimes it's an informal undesigned, but maybe intentional artifact. I guess, I'm wondering, is that distinction useful? Is that irrelevant in what you're trying to talk about when you're trying to have this expansive view of curriculum?

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

I think it's all relevant. I think we want an expansive definition of curriculum. We want people to be thinking about the formal, planned, intentional, the documents that get written and communicated. That's an important part of curriculum. And then there's this other part that just gets ignored that we'd like to draw more attention to. And that's maybe the informal, the hidden, perhaps still intentional, maybe sometimes unintentional.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, right, right.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

... but implied, right? And those are communicated by our relationships to each other, and knowledge, and space, and the way space is designed, and what it invites you to do. And then, there's all of the other stuff that's underlying it. Sometimes you might think of it like the politics of it, the politics of that knowledge that gets selected, or what it actually means for somebody when something is included, but something else is not included, and how that shifts your attention, or encourages you to want to learn, or not learn, stay motivated and engaged or not, all of those things.

That's curriculum too. There are curricular aspects to that, because some of it is intended, some of it is planned, right? It might not be written out in advance, but it is about what we want people to know and learn. If all of that is on the table, really, I think part of what we're trying to do is say, "Let's pay attention to it so that maybe we can use it in different ways. Maybe we can steer knowledge in different directions towards play," right? Something that I really enjoy about this podcast is that you're trying to get us to think curricularly about play too, and where it happens, and the kind of knowledge that arises through these more playful encounters.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I was thinking about what you were saying about hidden curriculum and the unintentional effects of these definitions, and I was thinking that the reason why I associate curriculum with school is because I get tested on it. I get tested on that knowledge. And something about getting tested and evaluated on that knowledge makes if I were to make a hierarchy of knowledge, that for some reason, that then becomes more important. Obviously, I don't think that right now. But, I definitely thought that up until I was 25 years old, so yesterday.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Soon as you hit 26, it all changed for you.

 

Haeny Yoon:

It might change. Who knows? I'll let you guys all know. But, I'm just thinking about how that ... The knowledge that gets tested and evaluated seems like the knowledge that is most valuable, right, and that if my grandma's teaching me how to make cookies, it's not like she's going to test me on that. She might be like, "Those suck," whatever. That could be evaluative, right?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah.

 

Haeny Yoon:

But, for me, the idea that this document, or piece of paper, or report card, or some kind of test is going to measure how well I've attained that knowledge. I don't know. I'm just wondering, could that be a reason why we ... Yeah, I agree with you. Curriculum is everywhere, right? But then, there seems to be a hierarchy of what curriculum is valuable.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah, I think that's been a neat trick of schooling is that assessment is so helpful for the cookies, right?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, yeah.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Every time I bake a loaf of bread, right-

 

Nathan Holbert:

Mmm, cookies.

 

Haeny Yoon:

... it's bad or good.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Mmm, bread.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

It's either it's bad or good, or there is something I could do better. And that's the case at the gym, when I'm learning math, if I am doing something that's really related to school content. But then, also when I'm doing other things, assessment is a part of it, but then, we've learned to only value the kind that can be maybe quantified, and especially in formal school settings. And so, we're only really thinking about the test scores, or other kinds of accountability data, right? Then we learn to forget and devalue all of the other things that can't be formally measured. And then, they become less important in the curriculum, because they can't be measured, and it flips into this cycle. And yeah, there's not going to be a way that if we take this expansive notion of curriculum, and try to build it into formal settings, there will never be a way to necessarily create data around its effectiveness, around how well it's working, so there's going to have to be-

 

Haeny Yoon:

Well, if people throw up after eating their bread, that means it didn't work.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Nobody throws up after eating my bread.

 

Nathan Holbert:

There's also [inaudible 00:13:31].

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

It's delicious bread.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah, I've perfected that.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I'm just kidding.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Okay. But, you know what I mean? It's the self-fulfilling circle.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, totally.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Schools definitely have a way of turning everything into somehow or another sacred or self-important, which is certainly dangerous. I want to ask a slightly different question. I agree with all this, but I want to imagine a person that's not at this table. We're all for education nerds who-

 

Haeny Yoon:

Speak for yourself.

 

Nathan Holbert:

We're all for education cool cats.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Is that better?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, it's much better.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Who can't help but be really inquisitive. A lot of times when we're out in the world, we like to look at things, we like to learn things. And maybe that has ebbed and flowed in our development. Sometimes we were more interested in that than other times. But, I'm wondering about, part of what you're describing is a set of values of how to experience the world. And so, I'm wondering for somebody who maybe doesn't think of going to the gym as a thing to be measured and improved upon, but sees their day-to-day as just going through the motions, how can this perspective be an important way for not just cool cats like us that like education, but everybody to start thinking differently about their environment and their world?

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah. Wouldn't that be fun if everybody were tuned in? I'm not sure how to answer the question, but I think there are just things you can say to yourself, like, "Hm, I wonder what I think about that?" As Haeny said before, sometimes I'm just, I've got blinders on, and I'm going through the motions of my day, and I might accomplish every task that was on my list, but there might not have been any joy in that, or pleasure in that, or maybe it didn't open up a door to something new and okay, maybe you don't want that, and maybe you don't have time for that, or maybe it seems like a privilege. But, I do think that we need to have that conversation with ourselves and each other about, okay, what's the purpose of all of this? That really is a curricular question too. What is the purpose of the knowledge? Why do we want it for? What do we want it to do?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. That's often the lesson plan goal too, right, in schools? What is the purpose of this? What is this for?

 

Nathan Holbert:

It's so often neglected, even in classrooms, right?

 

Haeny Yoon:

It's a formality.

 

Nathan Holbert:

What are we doing? Well, we're doing stoichiometry and chemistry. Why? Because that's what you do in week seven.

 

Haeny Yoon:

That's next in the curriculum.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Exactly. Purpose is so important, so yeah, I like that.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah, yeah.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

I'd also bring it back to Haeny's question on assessment. Maybe assessments are why we don't like the word curriculum, because we're going to get tested on this knowledge. But, Jackie and I were on a long train ride, and had a lovely conversation about, well, how do you evaluate a day or a life lived? What makes that day worthwhile? And that is a really curricular question, but a question that we find wrapped up in what do you value? What have I learned? What knowledge is really important in that day? Might not all have the same answers, but asking the question could open something up.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I actually had a thought. My dad used to teach us Korean in the basement of our house, and sometimes it would include two other kids. I don't even know where they came from. I don't even know who they are. I would shout them out if I knew their names, but I don't.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

They're going to listen to this, and they're going to be like, it's me, Haeny, it's me.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, exactly. But, I guess, I never appreciated that he organized what was going to happen into some kind of curriculum. I would never have said, my dad is a curriculum designer, right?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah.

 

Haeny Yoon:

But, I did think about, oh yeah, I guess he had to think about how he was going to approach this, how he was going to teach six, seven-year-olds that didn't want to be there, especially two of them being his kids, to come into this basement and learn Korean. He had to think about what materials are going to be there. He had to think about the interactions of the organization of space, right, so that's curricular, right?

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah, it's curricular. And then, the piece that you didn't specifically mention, but that is so important is that, that purpose that drove him to do that, I want my child to speak my language.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, right.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

I want her to understand our culture. I want her to be able to participate in some aspect of that. That desire is really what's driving it. And so, then he starts to think about, okay, well then what knowledge shall I select here? Some language, I'm going to have to get a couple students, otherwise she's not going to go. She's social, right?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, yeah.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

He understands his learner. But, it's that purpose at the top, I think, that then feeds through the rest of it.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, and that includes what you said at the beginning about relational.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yes, absolutely, yeah.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, yeah. How would you define curriculum to someone that asked ... What if it was like, "Sarah, what's curriculum?" What would you say?

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Well, we've given a couple definitions for curriculum. Here, I think I would say that curriculum is this prioritization and organization of knowledge, so it's asking these questions, like what kind of knowledge is most important here, and that's a values informed decision. What are the values and the vision guiding that? And then, what do I do with that? How do I organize it? Who are my learners? Where is this taking place? How else could it happen? How do I know that they're engaging this kind of knowledge? Yeah.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah. And knowledge is also an expansive word we could add into that, experiences. And I think what we talked about earlier, both the intended and unintended knowledge and experiences that might be planned as a part of a learning experience.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. I would almost challenge listeners to go to a different space besides school and think about what the curricular framework on it is, right?

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah. Oh, my God, we play that game all the time.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh, yeah?

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

We do.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, it makes it seem ... Even if you go to a museum, right, it makes you see it differently, like you walk in-

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, totally.

 

Haeny Yoon:

... and you start to realize, what's the purpose that they want to do here? How did they organize the information? What do they want you to encounter, and do, or to experience this?

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah. And so, one time, Sarah and I were ... We engaged in actually a number of curriculum encounters before designing the podcast. And so, once we took a subway ride from the one, from the top of the one to the bottom of the one train-

 

Haeny Yoon:

Oh, that's fun

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

... to just understand what's the curriculum of this subway car, at this moment too, because we saw that it changed in the two hours that it took us to do it. And we really were able to identify the kinds of knowledge that exists there for people in terms of how do they behave, what's expected of this ride? It seems like it's just there to transport people, but it also operates as a social space, sometimes a home, sometimes a place where we saw marriages. There was a couple in the marriages being enacted or negotiated, relationship-

 

Nathan Holbert:

On the train?

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Oh yeah, there was-

 

Nathan Holbert:

A busy day on the one line.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

You spend two hours on the train, you're going to see some stuff.

 

Haeny Yoon:

You're going to see some stuff.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Right. But it's also ... I like that invitation, and I like it applied to places that aren't typically educational, like okay, I could see how education might happen in a museum. But, can you stand in the supermarket, or in a park, and see the curricular opportunities that are happening there?

 

Haeny Yoon:

What about H&M?

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Oh, my gosh, yeah.

 

Haeny Yoon:

There's a curricular framework to H&M.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I think, yeah, the thing that's occurring to me as we get into this is that most of what you guys have been talking about, I would probably think of as designed experiences, and coming from a field of design, I think that's ... I do the same thing, like, oh, this is designed, this is designed, it's designed for a reason, and for a purpose, and it's designed to make certain kinds of actions and behaviors more or less likely. And the word curriculum, I think ... Then, I'm asking myself, well, why do I call those things designed experience, and why do you call maybe some of the same things a curriculum? And I think that's a really ... There's not really a question or an answer there, but I think the fact that there's two different ways to describe this same thing is interesting. And it gets back to your original point about this word curriculum, imbuing those things with a certain sense of stodginess, or a certain sense of control, to use your word, that it doesn't have to be that way, right?

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Yeah. I was at the Design Museum in London a few years ago, and they had really elegantly laid out these three exhibitions around, you can design objects, you can design places, and you can design maybe experiences, or some other third thing. And I think what we come back to is knowledge of something to design around is often missing from those conversations like architects design around spaces. Yeah, I think it is like we're not shy about the design vocabulary.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, yeah.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

We love coming back to the design piece. We still think of ourselves as curriculum designers, and it's like all of this exploration makes us stronger, more interesting, I think, designers. It is coming back to the design, but knowledge is what we're designing around.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah. And it's the knowledge piece that I think gets a really tricky, sticky maybe, because there are so many beliefs about what knowledge-

 

Nathan Holbert:

Is, yeah.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

... is and should be, and that does get back to values, and philosophies, and sometimes politics, and ideology. And so, as a culture, we tend to want to avoid those conversations, especially in education, because they can create silos. And we're just saying, "Hop on in, like let's have the conversations, and then we will still design." But, not having the conversations really limits what we're designing around.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, very cool.

 

Haeny Yoon:

That's why I love your title, Curriculum Encounters, right? I think that's such a clever way to distill that idea.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah, it's an invitation built in.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, right. Let me bring it back full circle to schools now. How do we make curriculum, or the idea of curriculum ... I love what you're saying about museums, bookstores, H&M, right? They have a curricular framework, right, that somehow seems more interesting, and playful, and fun. And for some reason, there is a stink associated with curriculum in schools. My question is how do we get rid of the stink?

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

I love the way you phrase questions.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

I'm just riffing on this activity around smells.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

You said stink, so you're going to get smells.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

And just attending to how does this classroom, this school smell? How many smells could you inventory in a school, in a school day? What if a teacher or class just did that for a day? And then, what questions does that bring up for all of us? What memories, what associations? I think in some ways I became a teacher because of the smell of Lysol.

 

Nathan Holbert:

What? You liked it, or-

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

No. Well, I was volunteering in an elementary school during my senior year of college, and I walked in, I hadn't been in an elementary school in a couple of years, and the smell of the cleaning solution struck me so strongly, but in a very nostalgic way. It brought me back immediately. And this was like this, oh, I want to be here. This feels right, right? I think smell even can do so much more. And yeah, let's remove the stink from curriculum, and take that as an invitation to think about what stinks, and what other smells are there, and what is that doing?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, yeah, play with the stink. It's not about removing it necessarily. It's engaging with it. I love that.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

I love that, Sarah, because it is such a playful way to talk about, bring the body back in, right? We're so used to thinking of school as a place of knowledge, which is just the brain and what we're thinking about.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, it's [inaudible 00:25:44].

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

But, if you attend to the whole body, like, okay, we have bodies that smell things, and that get hot, and that want to wiggle and move around. And I think throughout the podcast, we do draw people through these prompts where they are moving, and moving your body, and moving into different spaces, makes you pay attention to different spaces, and smelling things, and touching things, and noticing texture, and noticing relations of things, and something surprising like, "Oh, wow, I've never seen that before." Just if teachers just start there, recognizing that the body has all of these other ... The emotion, the nostalgia of remembering smells, and what that leads you to, the stories that come from that, the emotions, the way you feel about it, all of that is ripe for ... That's ripe knowledge that we could also be paying attention to.

 

Haeny Yoon:

It's interesting, because in early childhood, we talk so much about the five senses, right? That's like a whole unit of study or something.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, you learn.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, but then, as you go on, we ignore basically all the senses except the one that tells you to listen.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, sight and sound.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah, [inaudible 00:26:52], yeah.

 

Haeny Yoon:

You only listen with your ears-

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Right.

 

Haeny Yoon:

... right, and there isn't ... We don't pay attention to the whole sensorial experience of learning anything.

 

Nathan Holbert:

In my cognition classes, I often have students that are just getting into this stuff, and the thing I say every time is like, "Look, if you're just focused on what's between the ears, you're missing the entire concept of cognition." I said, "The brain evolved in this, to be this gooey, fleshy, bloody lump inside this weird body that has these crazy appendages that moves about six foot off the ground." All of that stuff matters, right?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, right.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Also, I like just to say it really gross like that.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, right. You like to be garbage pail kid basically. Excellent. Okay, so I think, Jackie, you already alluded to what we can expect in the podcast, so a lot of moving, embodied experiences.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Field trips.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Field trips. Yeah, tell us a little bit more, like what can people look forward to in your podcast?

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

I think picking up on the field trips, we imagined this as like Miss Frizzle's Magic Bus for curriculum.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I had Miss Frizzle in second grade. Go ahead.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Coming along with us on those field trips, and yeah, we've got suggestions for activities, and prompts to spark some of these wanderings, and maybe design experiments, designing artifacts for listeners' own contexts.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

And in the first season, we really are focusing on Teachers College, because this is our home. This is where we teach the stuff. We explore spaces here on campus, and we're looking at academic spaces and social spaces. And then, we have a really cool episode on the hidden spaces at Teachers College. And through those spaces, we're asking people to really activate their senses, and look at aesthetics, and maybe tap into emotion and memory. And then, our vision is that in future seasons, we'll just move outside of campus, and we'll visit other places, like maybe some of those museums or parks, and talk to people about the kind of knowledge that lives in us.

 

Nathan Holbert:

And then it'll become a travel show.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

And then it will be ... We'll really get a bus.

 

Haeny Yoon:

You'll be Stanley Tucci, and you'll be eating spaghetti on a subway.

 

Nathan Holbert:

This season in Italy-

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Yeah, so we can really drag people to really understand what is ... I like that idea of eating spaghetti actually.

 

Haeny Yoon:

On a Subway.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Can we be the guest for that episode?

 

Haeny Yoon:

I'm just kidding. I've been a virgin to eating on the subway. Sorry. I'm out.

 

Nathan Holbert:

All right, well, I'm in. Well, thank you guys for spending some time with us today, and talking us through your work, and these ideas that you've been exploring through Black Paint, and also, the exciting new Curriculum Encounters podcast to be released February 27th. Check it out.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

Thank you so much for having us.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Thank you.

 

Jacqueline Simmons:

This was really fun.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Thank you for being here.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Thank you so much.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Thanks, guys. Bye.

 

Sarah Gerth van den Berg:

Bye.