Blueprint of a Field Visit: A trip to the Bushwick Art Collective
The foundational belief of this blog is to encourage educators to teach their students in spaces in their own communities, outside of the classroom walls. Learning in real life circumstances has countless benefits, ranging from connecting students to content in more genuine ways to building relationships between your local community, your class and school community members.
Although field visits can vary in many ways, the general blueprint of a field visit remains the same. The steps below highlight a recent field visit to the Bushwick Art Collective taken by our class as part of an integrated study on Brooklyn.
Curriculum: All of our field visits currently begin with the curriculum needs of our particular grade. Although students also learn essential research skills in the process, the source of our brainstorming for field visit locations always begins with the content we need to access. Depending on the grade you teach and the expectations of your study, you may have more or less flexibility in the choice of your study topics. You can read my post about choosing a study topic here! The Fall of our second grade year at Compass Charter School focuses on the identity of Brooklyn. How do the people of Brooklyn shape its identity, and how does Brooklyn shape all of us?
Teaching Team Brainstorm: Each time our team begins a new study, we create a brainstorm around our topics. I always use the prompt… “If you were to learn about (larger study topic), you would learn about (subtopics)” When learning about Brooklyn, we brainstormed ideas including architecture, food, entertainment, transportation, geography, laws, places of interest etc. Following this list, we add field visit ideas to as many branches of the web as possible.
Choosing and Scheduling: With our brainstorm in place, we begin to weigh the benefits and plausibility of each trip and begin to schedule our trips. This year our planning had the particular challenge of travel. Keeping safety in mind, and considering some shortages in yellow school bus availability, our field visits began as local, walking trips only. We recently received the ability to travel by subway, which made this trip to the Bushwick Art Collective possible. We worked with our co-leaders and school operations team to schedule dates for our trips, ensuring that subway passes and lunches would be available for students when needed.
Familiarize Yourself with the Location: I rarely (almost never) book guided field visits. This isn’t because I don’t think they can be valuable, but because our studies are so specific to our students’ interest and our school curriculum that it can be difficult to find guided field trips that fit our needs. Additionally, free trips can be plentiful, while costly field trips would have to be few and far between. For that reason, it’s important that I’m always familiar with the location that we’re visiting. No, I don’t know every subway turn, closed road or every detail of each space. But before visiting, I always try to brainstorm what the location may have to offer our study. Can a trip to the Brooklyn Bridge teach about history, architecture AND culture? Can we squeeze a lesson on diversity into a field visit to the Barclays Center by highlighting the variety of shows offered there? By taking an in-person or virtual exploration to the space you’ll be visiting, you’ll get the most out of your field visit. Call ahead and talk to the employees of the market to ask about the space, use Google Earth to check out the local scenery to see what else it has to offer while you’re there, read websites and watch videos. Some of these resources can even be helpful as previews for your students before the trip!
Before visiting the Bushwick art walls, I took a quick drive through the area to scout out where the art had spread to. Each year, the space that this incredible collective takes up seems to grow into more and more walls of the neighborhood. I also updated the photos available to our students in their center bin to display more recent images from the collective.
Inform Families: An important step of the process of taking a field visit includes informing your families of your trip and your intention. Again, because these trips are entirely planned by our teachers, it is not as simple as it may be for a guided trip at a museum for families to make connections to the content at home. Post on your classroom website or send home. a letter that tells your families where you’ll be going and how it fits into your study. In this case, our study asks the question “can a place have an identity?” and “what is the identity of Brooklyn.” To answer that question, we take trips to various locations that have a certain identity to them. In this case, Bushwick exposed our students to a neighborhood bursting with creativity, individuality and color.
Preview with students: Although I would always recommend previewing your trip with students, the way you do this will depend heavily on your intention with your field visit. Ask yourself, “is this trip primarily serving to engage students in asking questions or answering questions?” If your trip has been planned in response to a student interest or answer a question that the class is specifically investigating, previewing your lesson may involve more context and specificity. You’ll want to remind students what they’re looking for. “Remember, we’re looking for street signs that will teach us about the ways that cars navigate the streets safely.” You may show images of the route that you’ll take, you may identify some street signs to look for and you may even interview a Transportation Officer to ask about the laws of the road. On the other hand, if your trip is meant to immerse students in a new topic and encourage them to ask questions to investigate in the classroom, then you may not want to specify your intention. “Remember, we’re wondering about the identity of Brooklyn. While we’re on the trip, we’ll take a look around and discuss what we see and feel.”
For our trip to Bushwick, we read an article about the history of the Bushwick Art Collective. We then previewed a handful of art wall images with students and asked them to discuss how each image made them feel. Additionally, we watched a video describing the history of the Bushwick Art Collective to give students context on how this neighborhood turned into what it is now.
During your visit: Again, the goal of your field visit will guide what activities take place on your trip. For our trip to Bushwick, our ultimate goal was to immerse students in a creative and art-based location in Brooklyn, identifying that Brooklyn’s identity includes deep ties to art. With this location, it’s easy to make that connection with the immense number of murals, graffiti, sculptures, yarn bombing and more. With that in mind, this trip was rather open ended. We explored about 6 blocks of Bushwick, stopping a few times on each block to notice different pieces of artwork. We completed a VTS lesson on one of the murals. We asked ourselves, are they similar to one another or different? What did they represent? What does this tell us about Brooklyn? For other field visits, you may have more specific goals in mind that require more planning ahead. You may want to call ahead and interview a staff member at your location and ask them for a tour of the space. You may be on the lookout for certain features of the space or an answer to a specific question.
Debrief: Following our trip, typically in the time just before dismissal, I like to debrief on our trip in order to access student noticings and questions without forgetting them. Leaving debriefing until the late afternoon also gives me time to print out photos from our trip to prompt student answers. We generally follow up with two requests.. what did you notice and what do you wonder? I tend to save any specific objective, such as connecting this to the identity of Brooklyn and our greater goal of Brooklyn’s identity, until we have a full class period to discuss and connect together. So in most cases, I tend to plan a shorter debrief the afternoon of the field trip and a full mini-lesson on the topic the following day.
Follow Up Lessons: Oftentimes, a field visit can connect different parts of your curriculum together. Following each field trip during our Brooklyn study, we find the location we visited on a street map. Students learn to use cardinal directions, learn to read local street names, identify new places of interest while investigating the map, and start to make connections between the places they have visited and our local neighborhood.
Centers: The last piece of any field visit includes creating a center around the topic. In general, our integrated study periods include a brief whole-group minilesson followed by “center time,” where students research a sub-topic of choice. Sometimes before, but often after our field visit, we will open a center on the topic where students can dig further into their experience. Following our trip to Bushwick, we opened a street art center. Each week, up to 5 students can choose to work in this center. They will read articles, watch videos and examine photographs of Brooklyn street art, and then typically create their own version of street art to present to the class. Creating a center on each field visit topic encourages students who are particularly interested in that topic to dig deeper and engages them in research and learning about a topic of their choosing.
