On March 17, CUNY Professors James Lowry, Nerve Macaspac, and Cynthia Tobar led a workshop on “Autoethnographic Pedagogy: Student Expertise and Learning in Community.”

CUNY serves a diverse student population, including first generation scholars, undocumented immigrants, students living below the poverty line and students from communities historically excluded from higher education. All CUNY students have unique lived experiences and knowledge, but our teaching does not always recognize and value the expertise already present in the classroom. At the same time, many opportunities for meaningful pedagogy are missed because of traditional delimitations around the classroom and the institution of the university.

This workshop invited CUNY’s teachers working in the arts, humanities and social sciences to consider how self and community can become sites of learning and sources of knowledge. The three CUNY faculty organizers presented examples of teaching practices that center students and their communities and then participants worked in breakout rooms to share or develop their own autoethnographic teaching methods, culminating in a crowdsourced handbook of teaching exercises that we proudly now share with CUNY and the wider community.

Read their zine, Autoethnographic Pedagogies, by clicking the link below:

The zine is a compilation of autoethnographic teaching methods for open access distribution, and it exemplifies the power of collaborating across CUNY campuses and disciplines.

James Lowry is an Assistant Professor of Information Studies at Queens College and the Director of the Archival Technologies Lab.

Nerve Macaspac is a geographer, film-maker, and an Assistant Professor at College of Staten Island and Graduate Faculty at the Graduate Center.

Cynthia Tobar is an artist, activist-scholar, oral historian, archivist, and an Assistant Professor and Head of Archives at Bronx Community College.