Invisible Cities: The Arts and Renewable Community

CONTENTS OF CURRICULUM UNIT 13.04.04

  1. Unit Guide
  1. Introduction
  2. Content objectives
  3. Background
  4. Rationale
  5. Queen cities, a teacher's travel story
  6. Walking in the city
  7. The urgency for narrative through digital storytelling
  8. Class activity
  9. Classroom activity
  10. The poetry of the city is visible and invisible
  11. Probing for travel stories through collage writing
  12. Class activity
  13. Contempary artists as urban geographers
  14. Class activity
  15. Oral poetry
  16. Class activity
  17. Annotated lists of resources
  18. Materials for the classroom
  19. Appendix of state standards
  20. Notes

Travel Stories: Mapping the Vision, Walking the Journey

Gloria Brinkman

Published September 2013

Tools for this Unit:

Traveling you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the distances intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name. 1

Introduction

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is a richly pictorial narration by the explorer Marco Polo as he reports on his expeditions to the emperor of the Tartars, the Great Kublai Khan, describing in vivid form the many cities in the boundless territories of his kingdom. The prose describes fifty-five cities, yet it is the interspersed pages of dialog between Polo and Khan that frame the narrative with insights into human nature, memory, and desire. The great conqueror and his minstrel do not speak the same language yet it is evident that they understand each other through the poetics of their vivid shared imaginations. I am delighted to sprinkle memorable inspirations quoting from Invisible Cities throughout this unit's text.

The pathway of one's personal travel story is a richly textured avenue of investigation for adolescent students. The personal stories of adolescent students offer richly textured avenues of investigation. In this unit my students will explore ways to articulate and creatively illustrate their stories of migration and urban mobility. The high school at which I teach in urban Charlotte, NC is a mirror of the migratory landscape of the modern city. Though the Charlotte area has a long history of migratory populations, in present day it has become a mecca for families moving to North Carolina form Central and South America as well as Southeast Asia. Significant to this cultural dynamic is the fact that cultural traditions and social customs play out in adolescent students' personal histories as they are lived throughout the school day. This contributes to cultural visibility and invisibility in our urban school community. In the classroom the challenge, for even the most experienced educators, is to rethink the design of instruction to address the frequently transitory conditions of student engagement.

In response to the Yale National Initiative seminar "Invisible Cities: The Arts and Renewable Community" this curriculum unit seeks to develop students' awareness of the virtual environments within which we act out our lives every day. These 'invisible cities' are the physical, social, political, economic and cultural dimensions of life active within both the urban city and its microcosm, the urban school campus. Inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, this curriculum unit explores students' own travel stories as a path to creative expression. Much like the book's visual storyteller Marco Polo, students will recount the adventures of their urban travels and examine the spatial practices that structure the cultural geographies of their social lives, lived spaces and everyday practices of familiarity in the city and at school. Through the metaphor of the journey students will explore their travel stories as subject for art that will be shared through various means of storytelling including written and visual narratives, oral presentation through iPad videos and artistic expressions in both 2D and 3D media. Students will reflect on the role of virtual environments in modeling our lived spaces. Through reflection and artistic response, students will explore how they can affect their environments in a positive way.

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