In the animated children’s classic The Magic School Bus, elementary school teacher Ms. Frizzle uses a magical bus to take children on field trips to impossible locations like space or inside the human body. More than one school teacher has certainly watched this animated series with jealousy wishing they had a magic bus (or even a magic budget) that would allow them to take students on more field trips.
Field Trips with Mr. Hurley
Jonathan Hurley, an educator in the Buffalo school district is one such teacher. Hurley teaches 4th grade, a year when the state curriculum focuses on the history and land of New York. He has worked to develop a cross-disciplinary curriculum that helps students make connections across science, English language arts (ELA), and social studies, focusing on topics connected to New York State. Hurley has considered the way experiential learning through field trips could make these connections even more powerful. Yet, like most educators, Hurley is constrained by time and money so he had to get creative. He couldn’t take his students physically to locations around the state, but he could enhance student learning by creating virtual field trips that went beyond the textbook. Hurley drew on his love of video-making to create a series of videos called Exploring New York with Mr. Hurley.
Cayuga Lake, Ithaca | Photo courtesy Jonathan Hurley
These videos show Hurley traveling around New York State highlighting different locations. Some of these videos focus on a concept like landforms, but most of the videos focus on the history, geology, and geography of a particular location. Hurley explains that this information creates a story or a context for students, helping them connect to a specific location as they understand the geology that formed the landscape, and the human interactions that continue to shape the political boundaries and culture. For example, Hurley’s video, “The Most Powerful Waterfall in North America,” explores the erosion process that formed Niagara falls, the historical importance of the falls to the Attawandaron (a group of indigenous nations that have lived on the Niagara river for thousands of years), the efforts to harness the power of the falls to create hydroelectricity, and the resulting displacement of members of the Tuscarora Nation when the New York State power authority built the Robert Moses Niagara power plant.
Filming an Experience in a Place
On one hand Hurley’s videos fit in with the educational YouTube milieu. They are short (his more recent videos run about 3 minutes), informational, and composed of well-timed edits. Yet what makes Hurley’s videos unique is Hurley’s focus on what it is like to be in a specific place. Hurley said he was inspired by the social studies concept of “sense of place” and he wondered if he could help students connect to a location through story and also experience (his experience). Hurley films much of his videos with a selfie stick pointing back at himself.
His videos capture what Hurley experiences as he walks around New York locations. In one video, he walks down a street in Buffalo. In another he climbs a windblown peak in the Adirondacks. One video shows him shaking water out of his hair as he cruises along the base of Niagara Falls. The camera angle is intimate enough to capture the way the location affects Hurley, and wide enough to show off the New York landscape.
Where it all Started
Hurley initially showed himself on location to his students on a whim. His class was studying the Allegheny reservoir and he brought in some pictures of himself boating on the reservoir when he was a kid. Hurley says, “When I showed the students the pictures they were like ‘oh you were there. This is a real place. That’s awesome!” This got me thinking how these images were powerful for the students.” This led to Hurley making videos of himself in the places his students were learning about in the classroom. Hurley says this allowed him to “purposefully infuse those different curriculum pieces into products that wove all the strands together as anchor points for the different pieces of curriculum.” His videos highlight physical spaces while also narrating the historical, social, and environmental stories of those places. They are a natural addition to Hurley’s cross-disciplinary approach to curriculum.
Layering in Social Justice
Hurley works to highlight social justice issues through the videos. He says, “we have some great curriculum resources in the Buffalo school district that are trying to infuse more CLRI (culturally and linguistically relevant initiatives) and social justice topics into curriculum, and I want to build off of that to structure units that lend themselves to discussions about social justice.” He explains how the unit he is currently working on focuses on geology and geography of New York landforms, yet in addition Hurley says, “It’s also about the stories that people tell about the land around us.”
Hurley explains that the language arts part of the unit focuses on “different stories from different cultures with intentional focus on the Haudenosaunee, the indigenous nations in New York State.” In his video on Niagara Falls, Hurley includes a section that connects indigenous people to the past and the present of Niagara Falls, highlighting the fact that indigenous people still reside on the land adjacent to the falls. Hurley’s video emphasizes that the history of Europeans moving onto indigenous homelands is a social justice issue still problematic for indigenous people today. In another video Hurley highlights the history of enslaved Africans in New York State by showing his visit to the African Burial Ground National Monument located in lower Manhattan. This video highlights the important contributions enslaved Africans made to New York State while also noting their unfair treatment.
African Burial Ground National Monument, Lower Manhattan | Photo courtesy Jonathan Hurley
Working with Others
Collaboration is the backbone of Hurley’s creation process. Many of his videos feature experts that help bring context to the topic of the video. For his videos that explore topics related to indigenous rights, history, and storytelling, Hurley has collaborated with Dr. Montgomery Hill, a linguist and professor of indigenous studies at the University at Buffalo along with Bonnie General-Vasquez and Lorna Thompson, two indigenous educators in the Buffalo school district.
He collaborated with Anthony White, a graduate researcher and Buffalo educator, on his video about the African Burial Ground in New York City. And Hurley’s long time collaborator Devi Gopal, a graduate researcher in the University at Buffalo’s learning sciences program, voices Sedita dragon, an animated character that appears in some of the videos. This list certainly doesn’t cover all of Hurley’s collaborators and he hopes to keep extending the list. Hurley invites any community members with connections to New York topics to contact him to help share the story of New York places with Buffalo students. [somewhere we should say: Hurley can be contacted here: jnthnhrly@gmail.com)
What’s Next
While Hurley sees impact in the videos he makes for his 4th grade students, he still has aspirations of taking them out to more locations in New York State. Hurley says he hopes to write for grants in the future to bring in funding for field trips. “I would love to show students my videos and then take them to that location at the end of the unit,” he says. Hurley also hopes to support students making their own videos in the future. He says, “I’d love to have students go out and record in their own community.” Hurley also plans to expand the reach of his videos. While he makes them with his own 4th grade classroom in mind, he’d like to enhance their usefulness for other educators in the future. He says, “I hope to eventually link lesson resources with all the videos. I’d love to see other educators use them too.”
Penn Dixie Fossil Park, Hamburg | Photo courtesy Jonathan Hurley
Lead image: Gandondagan Seneca Bark Longhouse, Rochester | Photo courtesy Jonathan Hurley
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