Education
PortSide NewYork educates school students, AND we believe education is a life-long process; so we also educate adults, policy makers and the media about the waterfront.
PortSide offers school programs, here, at your school, and elsewhere. We work with diverse groups of all ages. Title 1 public schools and elite private schools from NYC, out of state, and abroad. We have helped teach college professors.
Our main space is a historic ship, the coastal oil tanker MARY A. WHALEN. That’s a ship that delivered fuel along the coast. We offer field trip experiences on that ship and other boats and around Red Hook. We have created and curated virtual resources as well.
Our inventive team creates programs in response to your needs. That helps us grow our continually evolving programs!
Visiting us is exciting because we are NOT in a park! Come here to be immersed in an authentic maritime place. We are surrounded by real working waterfront. Cruise ships, container ships, ferries, a tall ship - boats coming and going and some under repair - AND an active NYC Ferry dock. PortSide has a floating dock, rowboat and kayaks. Our Atlantic Basin location also has significant marine life (fish, shore birds and waterfowl) and a slice of wild urban habitat where urban botany can be studied.
Our interdisciplinary method & why we use the term “WaterStories”
Marine education is often presented as just STEM (science, technology, engineering, math). We use an interdisciplinary approach, because on an urban waterfront such as NYC’s, the human story plays a major role. NYC’s harbor story is not just marine life and ecology. PortSide’s interdisciplinary “place-based” education includes history (including Black, women’s and immigration history), sociology, urban studies, art and literature, current resiliency issues, even cat WaterStories in honor of our ship cat Chiclet and because cats rule the internet. Making these connections increases engagement by making the content relatable to lived experience. We can add advocacy aspects with tie-ins to current issues such as environmental justice issues and climate change.
We call our programs WaterStories not “maritime” because “maritime history,” until recently, focused alot on the ship as main thing and focused on stories of its leading characters (naval architect, Captain), and on ship voyages and battles. There was less focus on lower-ranking ship crew and on maritime’s whole impact on society in all its aspects (economy, culture, immigration, shoreline changes, as in our interdisciplinary method above).
Most content can be adapted for any grade
See our Excel sheet that includes options for a field trip to PortSide here. Download it and search by grade or subject area.
Some major subject areas and experiences we offer
Virtual museum Red Hook WaterStories tells NYC maritime story in microcosm and turns the peninsula of Red Hook into a teaching tool.
Our African American Maritime Heritage (#AfAmMH) encompasses stories of black achievement, struggles against the sea, struggles against racism, and aspects of daily life and work (it’s not all derring-do) around the country.
"Look who's here!" Red Hook waterfront wildlife. See the Critters page in our virtual-museum for info about wildlife living in and on the Red Hook waterfront. We have a Billion Oyster Project basket. We have testing equipment for water turbidity.
Elementary and middle school
ship tour followed by related book reading and/or making art connected to the ship tour.
where does your poo go? Understanding NYC’s combined sewer sytem and how rain brings that and street litter into the harbor.
Simple Machines on the MARY A. WHALEN. Teaching simple machines is part of New York City elementary school curriculum. Our program blends a TankerTour with learning (and finding) simple machines on the ship. This has a scavenger hunt for simple machines, a ship vocabulary list and ship plan. It’s a captivating maritime experience where all the simple machines can be touched, that teaches new words, and teaches how to read and see spatial relations in an architectural drawing. Students get a certificate inspired by papers that document sea time worked by professional Merchant Mariners. See our Simple Machine Machine that can be brought to your school in video below.
Puerto Rican Red Hook WaterStories
Sound+ light in maritime context (scavenger hunt on NYC Ferry to find buoys, then return to Mary Whalen to learn about Statue of Liberty, buoys, signal flags, Mary Whalen bell + jingles). See that in video below.
Whales, a classroom curriculum developed with Red Hook’s PS15. You can book a related whale watching field trip on ship American Princess out of Sheepshead Bay if you have budget.
This blogpost about programs with PS 676 shows several modules, our method and impact. We inspired PS 676 to become Brooklyn’s 1st maritime elementary school after just a semester and a half of our programs. The DOE transitioned it into NYC first maritime middle school.
Middle school and up
short kayaking experience near our ship
science studies related to our Billion Oyster Project basket
Relating the history of oil tanker to patterns of USA fuel consumption and energy sustainability issues.
Maritime 9/11: PortSide NewYork produced an exhibit on the mariner's response to 9/11 on the 10th anniversary of the attacks and installed this on another historic ship, the LILAC, in Manhattan. We have components of this exhibit to repackage the content into a traveling exhibit that can go to schools or libraries. We continue growing the content and are recognized content experts. Our founder & ED reported on 9/11.
Resiliency related to flooding. We have a lot of lived experience on this topic! Our Sandy prevention and recovery work won us a White House award for Sandy recovery and honors from the NYS Senate. Our ED Carolina Salguero was appointed by the Governor’s office to Red Hook’s NY Rising committee, New York State’s program to make communities around the state more resilient. See Resiliency 101 in our virtual museum content we can repackage according to age level. Note that you can get local weather and AQI from the Davis weather station we have on the Mary Whalen, go here, and you get more data if you download the free Davis Weather app. Curriculum examples:
We taught hurricane Sandy to Bed Stuy 3rd graders in conjunction with the non-profit "Behind the Book."
We worked closely with Columbia University’s graduate Historic Preservation program and gave them this in-depth 3 hour tour of Red Hook, participated in crits and Zoom consultations. We are sure their final report will help Red Hook.
We ran a pilot high school resiliency program.
We worked with Saba Mahmood, a Pratt graduate study focused on Red Hook resiliency, and she created the flood prep pamphlet here and sent this to local schools.
In 2024, we created a HS earth science & resiliency curriculum aligned with NYS standards about earth sciences that also includes resiliency and interdisciplinary issues and uses Red Hook for content. We created this with local teacher John Russo. If your school would like a license to use this, please email us here.
We have also given lectures on campus and partnered with urban planning classes from several colleges. Graduate student work in public history, filmmaking, and public historiy has been added to RedHookWaterStories.
Other
Make use of the massive selection of #eWaterStories programs we curated during the pandemic, resources for teachers, adults, families.
We offer community service projects to schools.
Summer internships and adult job training are covered below and offered here. PortSide has provided quality internships for interns from colleges that include SUNY Maritime, CUNY, NYU, Pace, Pratt, Princeton, Yale, and Brown, as well as students from Germany and Spain.
CTE education and job training for youth and adults
PortSide is committed to creating a pipeline to marine careers. See slide show below for images from the following.
PortSide is in discussions with a program that offers classroom training for Merchant Marine licenses; and once we have building space, we can host such classes by their certified instructors. We are also talking to local maritime training institutions to see if they can use our ship to train their students. Stand by for updates.
PortSide offered, until the DOE cut funding for it, summer preservation internships to a CTE high school, the Williamsburg HS of Architecture and Design (WHSAD). This program teaches life skills as well as job skills.
The MARY A. WHALEN has been a training site for adults - the painters union District Council 9.
PortSide trains adult volunteers in shipwork. They then seek work in the marine field or the trades, and we help them find work in the maritime industry. Over the years, we have also referred adults to maritime companies that could hire them.
