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Using New York City as a Learning and Teaching Experience: CITYterm at The Masters School
Elana Smith '00 - The Masters School, NY
Elana Smith spent a semester at CITYterm and graduated from The Masters School in 2000. She is currently a freelance journalist and aspiring teacher who enjoys cooking, hiking, and café latte.

(2/2007) -  Picture a weekend-long academic reunion where you connect with alumni regardless of age, attend stimulating seminars, and dance euphorically on a boat cruise around Manhattan. It is a reunion that is dynamic and adventurous, like the CITYterm experience.

As a Masters School student and CITYterm alum from the fall of ‘00, I attended this program’s spirited 10th reunion, which confirmed for me that the CITYterm impact continues to be felt long after students graduate from the program. As they did while they were part of the CITYterm program, the reunion attendees are still “authoring” their own experiences and leading rich and explorative lives.

What is CITYterm? ClTYterm is an interdisciplinary and experience-based, semester-long, residential program located on The Master School campus that brings together students from across the country to study the arts, politics, literature, architecture, ecology and history of New York City. While grappling with issues of race, identity, and social and environmental justice, students learn, according to CITYterm’s mission statement, to “engage fully in learning and thinking for themselves, about themselves and about who and what is beyond themselves.”

Students participate in a curriculum with a wide range of academic adventures: designing solutions to housing issues, complete with scale models that are presented to architects and urban planners; creating digital visual essays and soundtracks that describe the “story” of skyscrapers such as the Flatiron, Empire State, and Chrysler buildings; writing lengthy research-based histories on city-specific topics; and meeting with authors, artists, and politicians. These adventures are grounded simultaneously in what CITYterm Director Jo Ann Clark describes as “a wildly conservative emphasis on the basic skills” that are necessary for writing, reading, thinking critically, working collaboratively, and asking questions.

Inquiry is a huge component of the CITYterm educational experience. Students would come up with their own questions to make their learning active and relevant. As Jo Ann Clark explains, “We encourage them to link their questions both to the details of the texts they encounter - whether those ‘texts’ are essays, buildings or neighborhoods - and to the details that are meaningful to them from their own life experience. From conscious practice of making such connections, students emerge with a greater awareness of self and community.” The goal is for the student to become an independent author of his or her own experience and education and to maintain this practice throughout life.

Students also come away from the program appreciative of how to collaborate in an effective way. Throughout the years, the faculty has refined and articulated the student development skills that the various projects are structured to hone. These are delineated in an assessment model that includes such categories as collaborative learning, approach to learning, and even development through assessment. As such, students learn continually to identify their strengths and where and how they can improve skills.

David Dunbar, the program’s academic dean who was one of CITYterm’s planners, recalls “serendipitous encounters and events in combi­nation with the lure of CITYterm’s mission attracted a group of poets, artists, historians, scholars, and actors who all had the same response, ‘I so wish I could’ve done that, so I’ll help you.’” Today these individuals include Kenneth T. Jackson, Barzun professor of history at Columbia University and co-author with David of Empire City, Junot Diaz, the Dominican-born writer whose work appears regularly in The New Yorker, and Fipp Avlon, speechwriter for former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and acclaimed political writer.

According to Rachel Stettler, who also helped to develop CITYterm, the founding values of the program were learning to learn, viewing learning as experience, building a community, and blurring the lines between city and classroom. Now, a goal is to extend CITYterm’s experiential and interdisciplinary approach to a wider circle of Masters School faculty members. Toward that end, David Dunbar, through a matching grant by The Educational Foundation of America, is leading an effort to explore how teachers articulate, analyze, and codify the essential components of teaching that engage students at high levels of learning. He explains that the faculty will also explore alternative means of assessment, “going well beyond traditional tests and papers to determine if the deep learning and critical thinking that we value are indeed taking place.”

In the interim, ClTYterm’s curriculum is constantly being refined as faculty gather knowledge about how students learn. “We know the CITYterm program works with a group approximately of thirty students per semester,” David Dunbar explains. “The challenge will be to make it work with a school of 500 students.” As he works more closely with The Masters School faculty, progressive experience-based models of teaching and learning have begun to be integrated into the high-quality, traditional curriculum to make “The Masters Experience” even more distinctive and challenging.

I, personally, was challenged at CITYterm to approach learning in an intellectually rigorous way and with a generosity of spir­it. Much of my time was spent recognizing, and then breaking down, self-imposed limitations and constrictions. I gradually was awakened to a greater complexity of thinking and being. I felt this awakening most dramatically during a project called The Neighborhood Study, in which a group of us presented a multimedia ‘reading’ of Manhattan’s Lower East Side from information based on classic research and on our visceral experiences wandering the streets and interviewing its residents, shopkeepers, and community activists. The Lower Eastsiders drew me deeply into their compelling experiences and made me eager to record and share their stories. However, I experienced what Jo Ann Clark calls “the stealth effect,” for it was only after I completed CITYterm that I realized that I make meaning by telling peoples’ stories, which has fueled my interest in journalism.

Adapted from an article appearing in The Bulletin, Fall/Winter 2006, The Masters School.