As teachers in Brooklyn, we were aware that our students� richest classroom was the city itself. The primary goal in our course was to give the students multiple frameworks through which to look, to listen, to understand and to imagine the city and their position within it, and then to extend that knowledge through time to earlier New Yorks and through space to other American metropolises, to Rome, to Paris, and to the diverse cities around the globe from which the students had originally come.

     Using the Rudy Bruner for Urban Excellence projects as a backbone for the course helped students to view the city as a dynamic force that transforms through the efforts of individuals as well as governmental bodies, and sometimes through an active collaboration between the two. The use of art, music, poetry and literature deepened their understanding of the psychological experience of people at the city�s center and on its margins. Careful clustering of a Bruner project, social science and literary readings around a single theme was useful, but often not enough; the students needed direct guidance and encouragement to help them form creative connections among disparate materials. In a multi-discipline, multi-teacher classroom, there is always a temptation to assign too many works for each unit. We found it was better to do more in-depth discussion of fewer readings, and that it was necessary to leave students sufficient time for group work on their final case studies. Despite the pitfalls, the interdisciplinary approach kept the classroom always lively and stimulating for teachers and students alike. The proliferation of directions, thoughts, approaches and materials matched the subject matter; is not the city itself, as Hemingway said of Paris, a �moveable feast� which, if you are lucky enough to inhabit, to analyze and to create when you are young, will travel inside of you for the rest of your lives?