Bank Street College consultant Roberta Altman is the learning coordinator of the TASC (The After School Corporation) partnership with the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The purpose of the partnership is to connect museum learning to on-site school learning so that the school itself becomes a museum site. In other words, as Roberta poetically puts it, to connect the museum and the community "so that people see the treasure of learning right beneath their feet: in their own neighborhood, in an empty lot, in how birds feed and nest and make a living in the city."

"The museum itself is just the visible evidence of a whole way of looking and being in the world," Roberta continues. "Behind all the exhibits is a question: Why is the world the way it is? Why are we the way we are?" That same question, she says, can shape the way we look at ourselves and the world around us, whether we're in the museum, or in the classroom, or sitting on the front steps of our apartment building.

the museum is a place but also a process

That process is one of discovering and learning about the world. In the museum it's manifested through exhibits and expeditions, but this process can take place just about anywhere. Under Roberta's guidance it does, in a cycle of learning and sharing that goes back and forth between the museum and the school community. "It's a frame of mind," she explains. "You can always go on an expedition. You can exhibit what you know anywhere."

The process begins with developing questions and the accumulation of knowledge. Last year, a group of kids came to the Natural Science Center at the AMNH to look at an exhibit on the geology of New York City. "They played the 'What's in the Rock?' game; they looked at samples of the Manhattan schist and Fordham gneiss that comes jutting out in various places throughout the city. Then they moved on to the New York State Environment Exhibit, where they learned about glaciation. And then, because most of the rock in New York City is metamorphic, they went on to the Hall of Planet Earth to learn about the rock cycle," Roberta explains.

Once the kids were back in school, the question was, "Where are the rocks?" So the class went on a rock hunt. "At the entrance of the school building, we found slate and granite. A block and a half away from the school, in an empty lot across from the Wonder Bread factory on Third Avenue, we found a huge boulder of Manhattan schist, filled with mica and garnet. And Crotona Park, two blocks away, was full of Manhattan schist outcroppings covered with glacier scratches," Roberta reports.

Kids from another TASC afterschool she works with made a display of their findings. "One kid was digging in his yard in the Bronx with his dad, and his shovel hit something hard. He said, 'Dad, something's here!' and dug up a hunk of schist with garnets as big as your thumb," Roberta recounts. "That was displayed as a 'Guest Rock,' with a drawer of its own." The children made a brochure — Guide to the Rocks in Our School — to accompany the display. "The kids see printed guides in the museum, so they come away and realize they can create guides to their school community: the school building itself, the block it sits on, and the immediate neighborhood."

Another workshop to build this kind of community-museum connection took place at a brand-new school. "The steps and plaza entrance were made of granite from the Adirondacks, an ancient batholith, some of the oldest exposed rock in North America," says Roberta. "So the students come to the Hall of Planet Earth to find out all about the rock cycle. Then they walk through the Theodore Roosevelt Rotonda, which is made of stone from all over the world and all different geological eras, and see a record of ancient sea bed fossils. Then they go back and do a survey of the buildings around their school, and in that way their whole neighborhood comes alive to them. They see things they may have walked past over 1,000 times and never realized the amazing stories they tell."

bringing it back to the museum

Roberta describes the TASC Partnership as "a holistic program. It's really embedded in the knowledge that the students discover and acquire," she explains. "First they learn from museum experiences. Then they bring it back home and look to their community as a resource. And then they bring what they know back to the museum. Museum instructors help link learning and experiences at the Museum and at the school sites to help children make the connections. It's a continuous cycle of going back and forth."

The cycle might take four weeks or six weeks or two months. It might originate with some questions in the classroom: What are those birds doing on the window ledge? Where do they sleep? During a museum field trip, the kids find out more about birds. Back on site, they investigate, gather evidence, and develop more questions; "The questions drive everything they do," Roberta asserts. Back at the museum again, the students have a different mindset; they draw on their expertise, and their inquiries are more focused. The kids also study how information is presented, so they can set up their own exhibit in the classroom. "It's like any good expedition: You come back to the museum with more information and more questions." Whether the lesson's about a weathered cornice, a flock of starlings, or the ecosystem of an empty lot, Roberta's students learn to see the extraordinary within the ordinary.