Category Archives: Events & Notes

Call for Proposals: Student Summit on the Role of Humanities in a Just Society

May 5, 2023 @ 9 AM-5 PM ET (Zoom)

What is the university you want? Transformative Learning in the Humanities (TLH) calls for creative, multimodal presentations from 50 CUNY students. Accepted applicants will receive a financial aid scholarship of $300 and a tablet. Applications are due Friday, March 3, 2023. 

We invite you to think about what your college community needs most to better support its students, and to imagine resources that would improve your social learning experience and academic life. To dream of safe spaces where respect, communication, and transparency are valued. To envision a stripped-down version of the faculty-student relationship, where faculty are better resourced themselves to be able to put students’ needs first. To conceive of concrete ways in which CUNY administration can better respond to issues raised by students. For the Spring 2023 Student Summit, a one-day virtual gathering, CUNY’s TLH program will provide a platform upon which students from all backgrounds can speak freely about what their institution is missing, and can talk back to their university.

The summit is being organized by a student-led Advisory Board. The Board encourages CUNY students to speak about real and tangible student needs, including mental health and childcare resources; issues faced by commuters, students on academic probation, and nontraditional aged students; racial equality, diversity, and representation; accessibility; community and belonging; and more quiet, reflective spaces provided for spirituality and self-care. A student-centered vision and student-run summit (a gathering to share creative works, reflections, manifestos), the Summit will allow you to take back the power and find your voice within the university to call for an answer to these unmet needs. The Summit will engage students, faculty, and staff in conversation to find common interests and begin transforming the larger institution to be more just, equitable, and student-centered. To remind CUNY administration that we are here, first and foremost, to learn and improve ourselves, and that we need a community that cares for us. 

The summit will utilize transformative, active learning methods, sparking a collaborative space of brainstorming and free thought with workshops, anonymous idea boxes, open discussions, presentations, and more. The Student Summit accepts applications in any form for 10-minute individual presentations or 1-hour panels (4 or more presentations to be delivered together in the same session), on Friday, May 5, including but not limited to:

  • A manifesto, call to action, or persuasive speech
  • An interactive activity
  • A poem or spoken word
  • A video you plan to make (or have already made) yourself
  • A performance (with or without co-performers, or an invitation to the audience to perform a script or interactive activity with you)
  • A work of visual art
  • A podcast, recorded interview (with permission to share), or sound recording
  • A dream syllabus or assignment for a class that does not yet exist
  • A modified syllabus or assignment for an existing class

The Student Summit invites students to respond to one question below or to another question of their own making:

  • How does a professor’s way of teaching influence the way you learn?
  • How can students or faculty incorporate social justice in the classroom? 
  • What do antiracist teaching methods look/feel/sound like?
  • If you could build your own syllabus/develop your own curriculum, what would it look/feel/sound like? 
  • Describe your university experience; what are some extraordinary experiences you’ve had in and out of the classroom?
  • How can you incorporate student advocacy in the classroom and beyond?
  • How has transformative learning affected the way you learn in class and beyond?
  • How can faculty better respond to issues raised by students in class and beyond?
  • How can we move beyond inclusivity to actual antiracist praxis in the university?
  • What could the university do to…
    • Be more environmentally aware?
    • Increase LGBTQI+ equality?
    • Be more accessible?
    • Make education more affordable?
  • What on-campus resources do we need right now?

Proposals from all CUNY students taking courses for credit in the Spring 2023 semester will be considered, including those on academic probation, those studying part-time, and those commuting to campus. 

If you would like to apply, please fill out this Google Form. If you have any questions about the application process, please direct them to Yuma Carpenter-New, Student Summit Coordinator, at yuma.carpenter-new@cuny.edu. Yuma will also hold open office hours, during which you can speak about ideas for proposals and the application process together. 

New College Classroom: Changing Ourselves, Changing Our Classroom, Changing the World! (Event Recap)

by Kelsey Milian Lopez

This recap was originally published on the Futures Initiative blog

On Wednesday, September 7th at 3:00 pm, CUNY and collegiate-wide affiliated participants gathered at CUNY Graduate Center’s Skylight room to discuss Cathy N. Davidson and Christina Katopodis’s new book The New College Classroom. In-person tickets were sold out. With nearly 400 attendees over zoom, this turned out to be one of CUNY’s biggest in-person events since the beginning of the pandemic. Both the CUNY Chancellor and GC Provost stayed for the entire event.

Left to Right: Cathy N Davidson, Chancellor Felix Matos, Christina Katopodis, GC Provost Steve Everett.

You can watch the full event recording here and view slides here

Continue reading

2022 TLH Summer Institute Recap

On June 7th TLH held its Summer Institute with the 2022-2023 Faculty Fellows.

Grace Handy (TLH Research Assistant and Librarian) kicked off the institute by introducing TLH leadership with one fun fact about each. You can read more about TLH staff here. Faculty Co-Directors Shelly Eversley and Matt Brim then shared their pedagogical biographies—how and why they arrived here as teachers. This is a great warm up exercise for students, who can submit answers to the prompt “How and Why Did You Come to Be Here?” on a Padlet for all to see and read or in conversation with peers on the first day of class (see example from one of Matt’s class). In addition to sharing their stories about why they became teachers—Matt learning how to teach vis a vis Poor Queer Studies and Shelly embracing love in her classroom to teach with “radical openness”—and what it has been like to teach at CUNY during the pandemic, Shelly emphasized that to choose to love one’s students is a political act and fosters an environment of belonging, value, and care in which the best kind of learning can be made possible. 

Next, it was the Faculty Fellows’ turn to share in a low-stakes collaborative, community building exercise facilitated by Christina Katopodis (Associate Director of TLH) using Mentimeter. Shelly and Matt asked the fellows to share their visions inspired by the “ecstasy” and “teaching and learning without limits” bell hooks discusses in Teaching to Transgress (pp. 201-208). The prompt for the entry ticket was, “In your classes, what makes possibilities happen?” to which the fellows could respond up to 5 times each. Below is the word cloud of their responses. 

This transitioned into a deep listening exercise led by Pedagogy Co-Leader Jason Hendrickson: the fellows were put into breakout rooms with 2-3 people and took turns speaking without interruption for 2 minutes (with a timer set). While one fellow spoke, the other(s) focused on being silent but active listeners. The prompt was, “What is your educational/pedagogical biography or genealogy? How did you get here—how did you arrive here as a teacher?” Following this deep listening exercise, the fellows reflected on the experience of deep listening in a metacognitive activity using Jamboard: 

Fellows also reflected on the exercise in the Zoom chat, some sharing it was too short as they had more to share and connect on with their partners. Next, Jason talked about why deep listening matters and reflection as a means to self-discovery. Then we stopped for a 10-minute break. Meanwhile, Grace played part of a podcast on (Re)Mapping Knowledge created by some of the Spring 2022 Faculty Fellows as their public knowledge project. 

After the break, Jason led us in a Creative DNA exercise inspired by Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, asking us, “How do we find and bring our creativity into our work and life?” Jason shared a clip from The Five Heartbeats and his own creative process: he often finds “valuable thoughts from music, movies and the trash,” which he then can put together and revise. Then we all engaged in five minutes of writing practice, responding to these prompts: 

  • Describe your first creative successful act. 
  • When you work, do you love the process or the result? 
  • Who regularly inspires you? (And why?)

These reflections were just for the Fellows to have for themselves. Next, Shelly shared the reason why we choose these particular books for this year’s TLH curriculum, “to creatively think about how we teach,” and introduced the fellows to Bruce Mau’s 5-Minute Manifesto exercise adapted for teaching at CUNY with the vision of transforming CUNY and higher ed more generally. The fellows worked in a collaborative Google Doc in batches to respond to various writing prompts and begin to construct a collaborative manifesto—one that we will return to at the beginning of the seminars in the 2022-2023 academic year. One fellow described it: “The interface looks kind of like a bunch of worker bees collaboratively/concurrently building a rainbow colored colony!” 

Afterwards, Shelly and Matt reflected on the activity and TLH’s mission for the coming year and beyond. Shelly has used this manifesto activity with her students, and fellows in the 2021-2022 cohorts likewise used this activity in their classrooms (read an example collaborative manifesto project here). Some fellows also shared their thoughts and contributions aloud:

  • Trusting students is most important
  • We can lead our students to do the same thing to share their thoughts
  • Revision means to see it again, re-doing and re-learning is important to our students and ourselves
  • We are learners and always learning
  • Instead of talking about success and failure, we should rethink the meaning and process of learning itself
  • We could think more about how to inspire students to believe themselves rather than focus on their grades and homework 

During the break, Grace shared two slides about TLH’s impact at CUNY and beyond in the first two years of the grant. 

We then played a short, inspiring video by Cathy N. Davidson (Founding Faculty Co-Director of TLH) who talked about the efficacy of active learning in the classroom and her reasons for starting with pedagogy, especially why she uses an anti-hierarchical model in her classroom: to make higher ed more equitable, just, and inclusive. Christina then led a follow-up activity, asking fellows to respond to this question in the chat: “What language do you use to introduce students to anti-hierarchical teaching methods? How are you thinking about upending hierarchies in your own classrooms?” Some responses included:

  • Co-production of knowledge
  • Understanding the classroom as a community
  • Students’ own grading of their performance
  • I use language influenced by Freire, hooks, and Zinn, as examples
  • I ask my students to create a Community Agreement and then ask them for help to improve the whole class
  • Talking with students about standardized English in classrooms and academia — and how languages are hierarchized in these contexts
  • I like to start with a literacy map that traces their important literacy events in life. Then we reflect and discuss them. A question I pose is – did your map reflect standardized testing or a grade?
  • One of the first things I do to show (if not explicitly tell) is to respond to the same introductory discussion prompt I give them (thinking of hooks here — “I do not expect to…share in any way that I would not share” p. 21)
  • Developing own questions and converting them into students’ own assignment
  • I begin by telling them that no person is illegal
  • Peer revision, students teaching one another
  • I have students do three reflections. In the first, they answer the question “How do you define history.” They return to the question at the midterm and the final. There is not a right or wrong answer—they track how their own ideas develop.
  • Tying the learning/knowledge to our everyday lives and critically interrogating our own positionalities

Before breaking into small groups to begin brainstorming potential public knowledge projects inspired by anti-hierarchical transformative teaching methods, Christina introduced some of the logistics about how the projects work. Examples of prior projects on TLH blog: https://transform.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ The fellows then broke out into their public knowledge project groups and worked collaboratively on Jamboard.

Jessica Murray (TLH Director of Digital Communications) followed this activity with an explanation of how TLH uses CUNY Academic Commons groups to facilitate communications between fellows and their cohorts. The main site is Transformative Learning in the Humanities. Grace then shared an example CUNY commons website that one Spring 2022 fellows group created with their students as their public knowledge project—a good example of the versatility of the platform and how it supports collaboration. After Christina answered some questions about the public knowledge projects, the fellows went back into their groups to share syllabus and teaching ideas and discuss how they can practice student-centered, empowered teaching and learning in the coming academic year.

Incoming Pedagogy Co-Leader Virginia Diaz made several announcements about upcoming events in TLH events. The institute was a great opportunity for the Fellows to meet and connect, and begin thinking through their collaborations on transformative teaching and active learning.

“Light Bulb” Moments in the Humanities Classroom: An Interactive Workshop Recap

On 11 May 2022, Emily Ripley (Queens College), Abby Anderton (Baruch College), Nerve V. Macaspac (College of Staten Island/Graduate Center), Oriana Mejías Martínez (LaGuardia Community College), and Lisa Marie Anderson (Hunter College) shared their experiences of transformative moments in their classroom. They presented examples of active learning from their courses, sharing the work of their students and engaging recentering student voices inside/within the classroom.

IMAGE ABOVE: Students exploring material culture objects from the Queens College Fashion and Textiles Collection in their History of Fashion course. IMAGE SOURCE: Emily Ripley.

With the words and concepts of Audre Lorde and Felcia Rose Chavez in hand, Ripley began the process of reimagining the traditional history of fashion lecture course. The goals were to work towards creating a fully active learning environment, to disrupt the Eurocentric focus of the History of Fashion in the West, and to allow the class to take part in an upgrading project. Across the semester she cracked open the professor/student barrier by establishing an open dialogue with her class, interspersed with regular group think-pair-share moments to involve everyone. A method of investigating material culture objects was refined within the classroom. Students also gained agency by writing questions for the test, and many experienced a new, revelatory understanding of their own learning processes. The professor learned firsthand what particular testing methods were most accessible for her students with learning disabilities, and through discussions with her class, developed a new way to flip the structure of this traditionally formatted course.

IMAGE ABOVE: One student project focused on Florence Price, a Black female composer whose work is receiving renewed interest in concert programs across the US.  By exploring her work for String Quartet, the student analyzed Prices’ unique musical idiom and some contemporary performances of her work. IMAGE SOURCE: Abby Anderton

Anderton discussed various digital story-telling tools, including ReadyMag and StoryMaps as a way of making less well-known historical figures audible.  She shared her students’ work on composers like Florence Price, Clara Schumann, Alma Mahler, and Charles Ives.  Digital story-telling platforms empower students to tell the narratives that are important to them.

IMAGE ABOVE: Students of Urban Geography at CSI used mapping, photo typology, and virtual reality (VR) during field work at the North Shore of Staten Island in examining the differential politics of memorialization, public space and gentrification, and rules of place in New York City’s “Forgotten Borough.” IMAGE SOURCE: Nerve Macaspac

Macaspac presented student-centered projects that activate the students’ sense of place through mapping and spatial ethnography of parts of New York City using a combination of analog (i.e., hand-drawn maps, mixed media, etc.) and digital technology (i.e., virtual reality, video, sound recordings, etc.).  

IMAGE ABOVE: Clockwise, the first shows a picture from Madres de Plaza de Mayo; a community and political movement asking for the disappeared-detained people from the Dirty War. Second picture shows a Central American map and pictures of flooded terrain and drought force people from those lands to migrate. Third picture shows an image from La Masacre de Ponce; people are running/escaping. Fourth picture show five images of women from Colombia, three of them on the top; political figures, and two at the bottom; socio political movements made of women against feminicide and supporting abortion rights. IMAGE SOURCE: Oriana Mejías Martínez 

Mejías Martínez presented about the opportunities that recentering students’ knowledge in the classroom brings to the class content and experience.  

She follows Professor Ofelia García’s scholarship on translanguaging due to broader experiences that these practices foster and develop on language integration and safe space in the classroom. As a result, students were able to choose and work on oral presentations about relatable issues that make historical events even more present at this moment.

IMAGES ABOVE: Top: Some of the artists from Prof. Anderson’s class playlist of music with German lyrics. Below: When reviewing difficult grammar topics, peer instruction led most students to choose the best answer. IMAGE SOURCE: Lisa Marie Anderson.

Lisa Marie Anderson talked about three transformative moments that helped to build community in a first-semester German course. (1) Compiling a course playlist of music with German lyrics introduced students to vocabulary and culture, and also helped them appreciate how much they had learned to understand in just a few weeks. (2) A semester-long virtual study abroad project showed students that they could already use German websites to do things like find a place to live, shop online, and navigate a new campus and a new city. (3) Using metimeter.com and peer instruction to review the midterm exam gave students a low-stakes, anonymous, collaborative way to engage in self-reflection and self-correction.

TLH Faculty Fellows

Emily Ripley (Queens College) is an artist and a fashion historian, director of the Fashion and Textiles Program, and curator of the Queens College Fashion and Textiles Collection. She teaches courses in the history of fashion, fashion and material culture, contemporary dress experiences, fashion and film, and fashion sketching.

Abby Anderton (Baruch College) is a musicologist who teaches topics in music history from Classicism to New Music. 

Nerve V. Macaspac (College of Staten Island/Graduate Center) is a political geographer, cartographer, and filmmaker. He teaches courses in Urban Geography and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). His classroom projects can be viewed here: https://geospatialcsi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/  

Oriana Mejías Martínez (LaGuardia Community College) is an Adjunct lecturer and teaches Spanish language and culture. Currently a PhD. Candidate at Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures program at the Graduate Center.

Lisa Marie Anderson (Hunter College) teaches German language, literature, and culture at all undergraduate levels. She is also a co-founder of ACERT, Hunter’s center for teaching and learning.

Imagining a CUNY without Grades: A Podcast and Manifesto by and for CUNY Students

One of the spring Fellows public knowledge projects was a podcast and manifesto, organized by Michael L. J. Greer (Brooklyn College), Gisele Regatao (Baruch College), Rebecca L. Salois, (Baruch College) and Casandra Silva Sibilin (York College). The Fellows were joined by twenty students in a conversational podcast on ungrading. The conversation revolved around the following key questions: How does/could/should grading work at CUNY? What does grading mean to students? How do they perceive the concept of ungrading? What do they think of the ungrading practices they have experienced so far? Eight of the students asked questions and engaged in the conversation verbally, and the remaining twelve students participated in the written manifesto after reflecting on the conversation that took place during the podcast recording. The result is an engaging recording where students and professors discuss their experiences of ungrading, and explore the function that grades have played in their own lives. Students think about the virtues and potential downsides of ungrading at CUNY, discussing their fears, hopes, joys, and frustrations. The professors weigh in on questions students have around the value of ungrading, and the podcast ends with a brainstorm on how students might participate in creating a CUNY without grades. The collective manifesto that accompanies the podcast declares a vision for what a CUNY without grades would look and feel like. The podcast, manifesto, and a list of resources on ungrading are compiled in the website Imagining a CUNY Without Grades.

Event Recap: Adventures in Ungrading: The Community College Experience

During this interactive roundtable event, five TLH Faculty Fellows – Jennifer Corby (Kingsborough Community College), Nicole Kras (Guttman Community College), Grace Pai (Guttman Community College), Dusana Podlucka (LaGuardia Community College), and Midori Yamamura (Kingsborough Community College) – shared their experiences of implementing ungrading in their courses. They were joined by 10 of their students who discussed how ungrading has helped and/or hindered their learning process.  

The event, which was attended by 84 participants, began with an introduction to how ungrading is a student-driven approach that emphasizes feedback, assessment and reflection of the learning process over scores, mastery of skills, or standardized outcomes. The fellows collected student definitions, opinions and reflections of ungrading through a survey form taken by 52 students (see slides and booklet of student reflections). 

The five Fellows then shared examples of ungrading across various disciplines. Professor Corby shared how she gave options for “choose-your-own adventure” activities and had students complete self-assessments in her Introduction to U.S. Government & Politics course. Professor Yamamura’s Global Contemporary Art students attended 8 asynchronous events that were part of the UnHomeless NYC exhibition she organized; students worked on group reflections and held consultations with her to help them incorporate their reflection of ungrading in their final papers. For her Civic Engagement in a Global Society first year experience (FYE) course, Professor Pai implemented a system of self grading, peer grading, monthly learning journal entries, an end-of-semester individual grade conference, and most importantly – student-created rubrics on major assignments where students discussed what makes for a quality assignment submission before creating a rubric with definitions and points for weighted categories as a class. Students in Professor Kras’ Human Services Fieldwork and Integrative Seminar course ​​submitted weekly written, audio, video, or visual art reflections – alongside creating their own self-grading criteria connected to the purpose of the assignment. Finally, Professor Podlucka discussed how she focused more on providing student feedback on weekly reading responses, in addition to feedback on the process of writing a staged research paper for her Social Psychology course.

Ten student panelists (listed below) then shared their experiences and perceptions of being ungraded. Following are some examples of student responses.

What I liked is how we get to speak about this with the professor during her office hours. It was such a good feedback experience. We could talk about our assignments.  We could talk about what we are doing right, which way is the right way, which way is the wrong way.  That was a new way of learning. The grading system, when you get a good grade, you don’t exactly know why.  When you don’t get a good grade, we still can’t ask why. We just know we didn’t do good and that’s it. In this, we literally had a step-by-step guide from the professor where we are going wrong and what we have to do.  It was less pressure for both the professor and the students. Learning was fun with this system.  

I would say it helped my learning process because it enabled me to reconsider power dynamics in the classroom.  Something to consider in grading is like why is the professor doing the grading, why doesn’t my input matter? I feel like ungrading tackled that and empowered me to seek out feedback, using it more effectively, prioritizing it so I can learn from it and improve. So that’s one of the biggest outcomes I’ve retained and I’m really thankful for it.

We’ve done projects before like based in math which isn’t my strong suit, but when it comes to ungrading, we actually made the rubric for it.  We could say my strong suit is this, may not be this but I need to put effort towards it.  It was a give and take relationship where we could say what we wanted to put effort in, what we thought was important. The might seem small in the eyes of a teacher but whatever you think is important, you can say I want this to reflect in my project.  You don’t really see that in my other classes.  It’s invigorating.  Maybe you spent hours on one small thing and you are finally getting recognition for it.

While students overwhelmingly expressed positive experiences with “ungrading,” there were also identified challenges and concerns noted from both faculty and students. One student shared, “I also don’t really like grading myself because I feel as though there’s always room for improvement.  I feel like who do you think you are?” Faculty and participants in the chat shared concerns with implementing this approach in larger courses, on how to communicate this novel way of thinking about grading to students and colleagues, and how to align this practice with university grading requirements.   

Student panelists

  • Nabeela Hashim, Kingsborough Community College
  • Elias Goldstein, Kingsborough Community College
  • Caroline Sorial, Kingsborough Community College
  • Holliday Senquiz, Guttman Community College
  • Deborah Bereket, Guttman Community College
  • Lishon Vesprey, Guttman Community College
  • Miyoko Wong, Guttman Community College
  • Brenda Quinio, LaGuardia Community College 
  • Jessica Carranza, LaGuardia Community College
  • Stephanie Tapia, LaGuardia Community College

Read the event transcript (PDF).

Event Recap: Liberation Literacies Pedagogy: At the Intersection of Language, Race, and Power with Dr. Jamila Lyiscott

In her workshop on April 5th, Dr. Jamila Lyiscott, aka, Dr. J, began by thanking all those who made this event happen, as the quest towards justice cannot be taken for granted. We were then put into breakout rooms for a short activity, with the following instructions:

1. Choose a ‘whistle-blower’

2. Answer the question, “should multiple literacies be allowed in classrooms?”

3. You are only allowed to use two syllables or less for the duration of the conversation

4. If this rule is broken, the ‘whistle-blower’ should make an obnoxious sound

In the reflection afterwards participants discussed how the limitations robbed their motivation to speak, but not because they had nothing to say. Dr. J shared how this exercise helps to reveal how harmful education spaces can be: enforcement of “standard” language norms turns faculty into “whistle blowers” robbing students’ motivation, while also preventing enforcers from hearing students. To combat these linguistic constraints, Dr. J pointed to the liberatory capacity of languages and the cultural practices of people of color in particular. She noted how she includes a unit in all of her classes on the cipher, sharing a poem of her own, “The Art of the Cipher,” on bringing liberatory practices into the classroom, asking at one point, “how many students do we label illiterate by societal standards?”

Dr. J discussed code-switching as a continuation of colonial violence, requiring a certain language in order to be validated within the classroom and other institutions. She referenced the work of Dr. Geneva Smitherman and Dr. April Baker Bell who both highlight language as a site of cultural struggle, a marker of social mobility. 

Dr. J then played a clip from Glamour,Uzo Aduba Never Liked Her Name,” where Uzo explains she asked her mother to call her Zoe because no one can say Uzoamaka, and her mother replied that if they can say other names (e.g.,Tchaikovsky, Michelangelo, Dostoyevsky), they can pronounce yours. Here Dr. J emphasized how our classrooms are not neutral spaces, and if we don’t intentionally work toward racial equity and healing, we are holding up social injustice.

Dr. J asked participants to reflect on the complicity they have in the institutional rewarding of Eurocentric knowledge and language practices. She outlined how liberation is different from inclusion in that it is about systemic change, breaking down oppressive logics, not reforming a broken system, not just having people of color doing the same work that upholds oppression. She discussed how the case of George Floyd and the media’s focus on underlying health conditions and intoxicants is another example of racist literacy practices; sharing literacies and language is not just about words — they contain cultures and histories.

She continued with suggestions on how to put liberation literacies into practice, including challenging paradigm principles, divesting from racist logics, and demanding participatory action and institutional alteration. It means pushing back against impulses to demand students of color perform whiteness to gain success: “Standard language is the language of people in power, it is not the language of power.” 

Dr. J read the poem “(Untitled)” by Brian Yoo, written in response to Texan lawmakers suggesting Asian people adopt easier names. The event then moved to a lively Q & A portion, with discussions on how to best support students so they can develop their voices and identities while being honest about how the world and the university institution operates, while working collectively to dismantle it.

Join us for two upcoming public TLH events organized by the Spring Faculty Fellows!

Adventures in Ungrading: The Community College Experience

Wednesday, April 27th, 2022 @ 4-5PM EST

RSVP and speaker bios here

What are your students actually learning from your course? Are your students intrinsically motivated to deepen their learning and content knowledge, or extrinsically motivated to play the game of getting a good score and grade? “Ungrading” is a growing movement in higher education that critically questions the conventional grading system and traditional forms of assessment. Ungrading focuses on supporting and deepening individual student learning by challenging commonly used practices like learning outcomes, rubrics, grading on a curve, and participation grades. Join us at this interactive roundtable event to learn how five CUNY Mellon Transformative Learning in the Humanities Faculty Fellows are implementing ungrading across a range of disciplines in their community college courses. The Fellows will illustrate how practicing ungrading promotes the collaborative nature of teaching and learning, students’ active role in learning process, and making learning accessible, meaningful and relevant to all students. You will also hear from a student panel sharing their perceptions and experiences of being ungraded.

Accessibility: We will have ASL interpreters and live CART captioning for the event.


“Light Bulb” Moments in the Humanities Classroom

Wednesday, May 11th, 2022 @ 1-2:15 PM EST

RSVP and speaker bios here

What does a transformative moment in the classroom look or sound like? In this event, five Mellon TLH Faculty Fellows from different CUNY campuses will each present examples of active learning from their courses, sharing the work of their students and engaging student voices in this interactive workshop. Through the disciplines of German, Geography, Music, Spanish, and Fashion, we will demonstrate how collaborative pedagogy helps us build a sense of community in the classroom and beyond. 

Accessibility: We will have ASL interpreters and live CART captioning for the event.

Event Recap: Jesse Stommel’s Ungrading and Alternative Assessment Workshop

In his workshop on March 21st, Dr. Jesse Stommel educated participants about the history of grading and the practice of ungrading. Kaz Elpharin, a current student at LaGuardia Community College, began the event by introducing Dr. Stommel. 

Dr. Stommel emphasized that ungrading is not a static concept but an ongoing conversation and practice that should include students. He brought up the compassionate grading policies introduced during the pandemic, asking why they haven’t always been present and if they could be maintained. He brought in open questions such as why we grade, who it’s for, and what if we didn’t, while acknowledging the precarity of many professors and administrative constraints.

Dr. Stommel also gave background on bias in grading and how inclusive practices means designing classes for the least privileged. He shared how past negative experiences with grading and teachers often impact the relationship students have with their professors, and how discussing such realities and making assessments flexible and responsive can be reparative. He shared information on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations, and how we can best support all students in learning instead of engaging in policing behavior, defining grading as a relatively recent technology. Dr. Stommel discussed the importance of context, that he doesn’t want all professors to simply use his forms of assessment in their classes, but instead open up a reflective dialogue on grading with their students. He ended the lecture portion insisting that effective education requires some necessary conditions, including equitable labor practices and meeting the basic needs of students, such as food and housing. 

Dr. Stommel then moved into a writing exercise, asking participants:

“Who do you teach? What do you know about your students? How are they changing? What do they want from their education? What barriers do they face?”

After participants shared their responses in a brief discussion, he gave another prompt, asking everyone to draft a “Dear Students,” message for the top of their syllabi, thinking about:

“What work do you value from your students? What will you contribute (as the teacher)? What does success look like in your class? How (as the teacher) will you know when you’ve seen it? What is the students’ collective role in constructing the course? How will you show care for your students? How will you show care for yourself?”

He shared a resources on basic needs syllabus statements and included an example of his own basic needs statement.

This led into another discussion and question and answer portion, so engaging that it continued after the event in an “Afterparty” conversation in a Google Doc created by Pedagogy Co-Leaders Javiela Evangelista and Jason Hendrickson.

Dr. Stommel was very generous in encouraging participants to share his ideas at future workshops. He shared his slides:

and included OCR enabled slides.

He also shared his workshop notes, which include an overview of the session and additional resources.

We’d also like to share the generative conversation that took place at the Q&A Afterparty.

If you’re interested in more events on ungrading and alternative assessment, the Spring 2022 Mellon TLH Faculty Fellows have organized an interactive workshop with their students on “Adventures in Ungrading” for April 27, 2022, at 4-5pm ET. RSVP here.

Join us for “Liberation Literacies Pedagogy” with Dr. Jamila Lyiscott

Liberation Literacies Pedagogy: At the Intersection of Language, Race, and Power

April 5, 2022 at 4-5:15 PM ET via Zoom

Privileging mainstream forms of language and literacy in schools not only under-prepares students for our predominantly multiethnic, multilingual, globalized society, but it also perpetuates a narrative of deficiency and marginality for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Drawing on Dr. J’s ongoing research, personal experiences navigating multiple varieties of English, and her work engaging hip-hop, spoken word, and media for learning, this workshop problematizes traditional notions of what it means to be “literate” in our society and offers tools for disrupting racial/social inequity through attention to language, culture, and race as ideologically interwoven in our classrooms.

RSVP here [opens in new window]

Please note this event will not be recorded, however an event recap will be posted here on the TLH blog.

Accessibility: We will have ASL interpreters and live CART captioning for the event.

Jamila Lyiscott, aka, Dr. J, is an aspiring way-maker, a community-engaged scholar, nationally renowned speaker, and the author of Black Appetite. White Food: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom. She currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is the co-founder and co-director of the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research. Dr. J is most well known for being featured on TED.com where her video, ‘3 Ways to Speak English,’ has been viewed over 5 million times, and for her commissioned TED Talk, ‘2053’ in response to the inauguration of the 45th occupant of the white house. She has delivered keynotes and workshops at 100s of institutions throughout the nation where she works closely with youth, educators, and communities towards racial healing, equity, and justice.

RSVP here.