Embedded Files
Reading Journal
Noddings, Standardized Curriculum and Loss of Creativity
Noddings, Standardized Curriculum and Loss of Creativity
Ladson-Billings: "Yes, but how do we do it?"
Ladson-Billings: "Yes, but how do we do it?"
Cipolla, "Build it Better: Thinking in Feminist Maker Pedagogy
Cipolla, "Build it Better: Thinking in Feminist Maker Pedagogy
Public Art Encounters Journal Entries
GREEN Women on 53rd and 6th
GREEN Women on 53rd and 6th
Stone Pillar in Urban Park
Stone Pillar in Urban Park
Harlem Painting on Lighting Fixture
Harlem Painting on Lighting Fixture
Artist Journal Reflection
I used my journal like a place to actually stop and pay attention instead of just moving through my day. It started out mostly filled with reading notes, working through the assigned pieces before class and jotting down whatever stuck with me. Once the public art walks started, the journal shifted into a different kind of use. I'd sketch something before I even knew what I thought about it, then write my way into an opinion after. It became this two step process. Draw first, figure out what I actually saw second.
The reading entries are where I first got comfortable writing in fragments instead of full sentences. Just phrases that stuck with me while I was reading, not complete thoughts. Normally I want everything written out in full, but this forced me to trust that a short phrase would still mean something to me later. I could flip back weeks later and immediately remember the whole idea just from three or four words.
Once the sketching started, the rough drawings were honestly kind of the point. I'm not an artist and I never pretended to be one in these pages. But drawing something badly still makes you look at it way longer than snapping a photo ever would. You have to notice the proportions, the weird angles, the stuff that doesn't quite make sense until you're forced to put it on paper.
A lot of my entries have me talking to myself in real time. Little questions I couldn't answer right away, guesses about who made something or why it's there, stuff I clearly wanted to look up later but didn't want to interrupt the moment for. I liked leaving that uncertainty on the page instead of immediately Googling everything. It felt more honest than a clean finished paragraph would have been.
Going in I thought this was going to feel like busywork, another box to check for the class. It ended up being the opposite. It became the place where I processed things while they were still happening instead of after the fact when everything gets smoothed over and sounds more put together than it actually was in my head. That messiness is kind of the value of it honestly. The journal isn't polished and it's not supposed to be. It's just proof that I was actually paying attention the whole time, even on the days I was running on fumes.
Musuem Visits
New York Hall of Science
New York Hall of Science
Date/Time: July 9, 2026, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Key exhibit: "How Do We Power New York?" / Balance the Grid (energy exhibit)
The exhibit that really got me was the power grid display, a wall-sized relief map of NY State covered in icons for every power source (solar, wind, nuclear, natural gas, hydro) with an interactive "balance the grid" station where you physically route energy from source to city. This is Papert's constructionism playing out live. Martinez and Stager describe it as "learning by actively constructing knowledge through the act of making something shareable" (2013, Ch. 1), and that's exactly what this station does. You're not reading about the grid, you're building it. It's the same energy as the Design Lab wall in the building walking through "Identify, Iterate, Innovate" with Eames furniture sketches. Tinker your way to the idea instead of getting handed the finished answer.
The STEAM Quilt hit me too, made by Pre-K kids and gifted back to the museum. It reminded me of Cipolla's point in "Build It Better" that tinkering pedagogy works best when it teaches "something fundamental about how the world fits together and how we fit into it" (2019, p. 262), not just a solo kid chasing one right build. Also worth noting, the grid exhibit is funded and branded by National Grid, a private utility, so of course the story being told leans heavy on "we've got this handled for you" and light on equity of access or environmental cost.
Queens Museum
Queens Museum
Date/Time: July 9, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Key exhibit: The Panorama of the City of New York
Standing over the Panorama is its own kind of aesthetic experience, in the way Greene means it. She's writing about how most people go through life as "gazers, not seers; hearers, not listeners" (1977, p. 284), stuck in this passive, half-attentive mode. Standing on that walkway looking down at 9,000+ square feet of hand-built model city snapped me right out of that. It's a genuine jolt, seeing the whole city as a made thing instead of just the place I live block by block.
The museum layers politics onto that view on purpose, and this is where Rancière's argument about the aesthetic regime clicked for me. He says "the aesthetic regime of the arts stands in contrast with the representative regime" (2004, p. 31), meaning what gets shown and how it's shown isn't neutral, it's a choice about what becomes visible and what stays hidden. The 1930s watershed relief map next to the Panorama makes that literal. It shows how NYC's water gets piped in from the Catskills and Delaware systems, a reminder that the "self-contained" city on display actually depends on land and labor the model doesn't even show. The "About Us: El Imaginario Americano" photography section pushed this even further, pairing documentary photographers (Lewis Hine, Arthur Rothstein) with a contemporary artist's wall text that calls out the captions directly, asking whose voice is really speaking when a white photographer titles an immigrant's portrait "So This Is America?" That's basically Freire's banking critique in a photo caption. Freire describes banking education as a setup where "the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor" (1971, Ch. 2), and here the immigrant woman in the photo is the depository for Hine's interpretation of her own experience, she never got to speak for herself. Betsabeé Romero's "A Green Carpet for Everyone," a turf soccer-pitch installation tying migration and cultural identity to the sport, flipped that dynamic. It's participatory instead of passive, closer to the "learn by doing" spirit Cipolla writes about than to a museum piece you just look at.
Moma ps1
Moma ps1
Date/Time: July 6, 2026, 4:55 PM – 5:55 PM
Key exhibit: "McSwift" (mixed panel painting)
This piece spliced a Taylor Swift-style stadium concert shot with a painted Ronald McDonald mascot standing in the same bokeh-lit night backdrop. Two of the most recognizable commercial icons in America, pop stardom and fast food branding, rendered in the exact same visual language so you genuinely can't tell where the real spectacle stops and the corporate mascot starts. This is Rancière's aesthetic regime doing exactly what he's talking about, pulling ordinary, "neutral" images out of their usual context and forcing an uncomfortable new connection between them. It also lines up with what Greene means when she talks about art snapping people out of being "gazers, not seers" (1977, p. 284). PS1 leans hard into this kind of confrontational programming, and honestly it's a totally different mode than NYHOS or Queens Museum. It's less about explaining a system to you and more about making you notice the manufacturing behind something you assumed was neutral.
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