By Jen Lee, Media Producer
The Digital Futures Institute is proud to announce Curriculum Encounters, a new podcast from Teachers College curriculum design experts Jacqueline Simmons, Senior Lecturer and Vice Chair, Department of Curriculum & Teaching, and Sarah Gerth van den Berg, Visiting Scholar at DFI, about exploring knowledge, wherever you find it. Curriculum Encounters is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Increasing Accessibility through Multimodality
DFI offered a podcast “fellowship” in 2024 to allow a podcast project intensive hands-on support for a first season, with the idea that selected scholars would then be trained with the necessary skills to continue independently for subsequent seasons. Simmons and Gerth van den Berg’s project was chosen for the fellowship. They lead the Black Paint Curriculum Lab, which has hosted “a vibrant weekly meeting for dialogue and cultural outings with a rotating group of participants, including current TC students, faculty, and alumni.” They imagined a new iteration of the Black Paint Curriculum Lab that would widen the circle of participation to include those who experience barriers to attending in-person. In the process of converting a live experience into an audio podcast, they sought to bring key elements of Black Paint events into the new format, including embodied exploration, sensory inquiry, and generative conversation.
The result is Curriculum Encounters, an auditory adventure for educators. Season One introduces listeners to themes like aesthetics, memory, and the senses, modeling how to observe these elements in their learning landscapes—as Jackie and Sarah explore them inside a learning environment they inhabit, Teachers College.
Engaging and Inspiring Educators
This refreshing multimodal approach offers something closer to inspiration than instruction, with prompts and provocative questions in each episode designed to ignite listeners’ creativity and ground their teaching and learning practices in a full-bodied experience.
As the field of education aims to recruit, equip and sustain teachers and instructors at all levels, Curriculum Encounters offers a fresh dose of possibility, wherever listeners are, and whatever challenges they face. It introduces (or returns) listeners to their own innate ways of observing, synthesizing, creating and innovating–ultimately to a place of personal freedom and ingenuity.