Video screen grab showing a student's essay and illustration of a tree in the palm of a hand and the title, Change Within"

Engaging students in the larger conversation

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The team at TLH was thrilled to receive an email from Faculty Fellow Lara Saguisag (College of Staten Island, English), who wanted to share her students projects from the semester. Connecting the work in the classroom to what’s going on in the outside world had a big impact on her students, who completed their final projects with passion and excitement. Dr. Saguisag co-led the recent event, Creating Communities of Care in our Classrooms, a must-see presentation and conversation with TLH Faculty Fellows Jason Hendrickson (LaGuardia Community College), Reiko Tahara (Hunter College), and Cheryl C. Smith (Baruch College) and students about building community to support student success.

The theme of her ENL 323 section was was Narratives of Adolescence and Environmental Justice. Students produced a website that aims to engage young people in environmental justice. It includes reviews of books/films, profiles of youth activists, environmental justice actions young people can take, and much more. Check out the website, titled Call for Change (opens in a new window).

Her ENH 209 course theme was Literatures, Technologies, and Environments. For their final project, students had a public reading of poems, letters, and research projects which you can view here:

Public Reading: ENH 209 Culminating Activity

Final projects by the students of ENH 209: Literatures and Global Cultures (Fall 2021), College of Staten Island-City University of New York. These presentations are LIT!

She writes:

“Being part of TLH has really transformed my teaching and helped me think about designing assignments that allow students to become part of larger conversations. My students drew from their experiences and knowledges and were very passionate and excited about these projects. I just wanted to share these links with you as a way of thanking you for everything you do, for all you do to advocate for transformative learning.”

Thank you, Lara, for transforming your classes!

Imperialism, Education, and Resistance: Experiences from Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the Dominican Republic

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This interdisciplinary discussion with poets, cultural scholars, human rights activists, and historians explored the history and current presence of US imperialism in the Caribbean and the Philippines. Central themes included (neo/post) colonialism, its legacies and current experiences, expulsions, racialization, and climate change. Participants also discussed the role of education in resistance and proposed practical applications in educational settings. Raquel Salas Rivera from Puerto Rico discussed and presented queer anti-colonial poetry and spoke about the initiative The Puerto Rican Literature Project that consolidates, reflects and responds to community exchanges of Puerto Rican poets across all regions. Jody Blanco talked about how race and capitalism influenced how Filipino mestizo revolutionary leaders viewed (and invited) US intervention as a transitional force against Spanish colonial rule, with disastrous consequences after the Americans imposed their own imperial designs. Ana María Belique, from the Dominican Republic, discussed the fight against statelessness after ruling 168/13 of the constitutional court that revoked the citizenship of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent in 2013.

This event was organized by CUNY professors Fidelito Cortes, Javiela Evangelista, Niberca (Gigi) Polo and Rojo Robles. Student leaders participated as moderators of the final conversation.

Watch a video of the event (captions in English and Spanish)
Vea un video del evento (subtítulos en inglés y español)

Imperialism, Education, and Resistance: Experiences from Puerto Rico, The Philippines, and The DR

This interdisciplinary discussion with poets, cultural scholars, human rights activists, and historians, explores the shared history and ongoing presence of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean and the Philippines. Central themes include (neo/post) colonialism, its legacies and current lived experiences, expulsions, racialization, and climate change.

Imperialismo, educación y resistencia: experiencias de Puerto Rico, Filipinas y República Dominicana

Esta discusión interdisciplinaria con poetas, estudiosos de la cultura, activistas de derechos humanos e historiadores exploró la historia y la presencia actual del imperialismo estadounidense en el Caribe y Filipinas. Los temas centrales incluyeron (neo/post) colonialismo, sus legados y experiencias actuales, expulsiones, racialización y cambio climático. Los participantes también discutieron el papel de la educación en la resistencia y propusieron aplicaciones prácticas en entornos educativos. Raquel Salas Rivera de Puerto Rico discutió y presentó poesía queer anticolonial y habló sobre la iniciativa El Proyecto de Literatura Puertorriqueña que consolida, refleja y responde a los intercambios comunitarios de poetas puertorriqueños en todas las regiones. Jody Blanco habló sobre cómo la raza y el capitalismo influyeron en cómo los líderes revolucionarios mestizos filipinos vieron (e invitaron) la intervención de los EE. UU. como una fuerza de transición contra el dominio colonial español, con consecuencias desastrosas después de que los estadounidenses impusieran sus propios diseños imperiales. Ana María Belique, de República Dominicana, habló sobre la lucha contra la apatridia luego de la sentencia 168/13 de la corte constitucional que revocó la ciudadanía de miles de dominicanos de ascendencia haitiana en 2013.

Este evento fue organizado por los profesores de CUNY Fidelito Cortés, Javiela Evangelista, Niberca (Gigi) Polo y Rojo Robles. Los líderes estudiantiles participaron como moderadores del conversatorio final.

 

TLH Faculty Fellow-Led Events, Fall 2021

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Join us for our three remaining TLH Faculty Fellow-led events for the Fall 2021 semester, which highlight the innovative work our Faculty Fellows are doing at their campuses and in collaboration with each other. Check out the registration links below for full details.

Imperialism, Education, and Resistance: Experiences from Puerto Rico, The Philippines, and The Dominican Republic
Wednesday, December 1 @ 6-7 pm (EST)
Online (via Zoom)
Register Here (opens in a new window).

Bravery in the Classroom
Thursday, December 2 @ 4-4 pm (EST)
Online (via Zoom)
Register Here (opens in a new window)

Community Access and Equity in Health Education
Guttman Community College
50 West 40th St.
Wednesday, December 8 @ 6-8 pm (EST)

And, in case you missed it, be sure to check out the recap and recording from our first Faculty Fellow-Led event on November 10, Creating Communities of Care in our Classrooms.

Creating Communities of Care in our Classrooms – Event Recap and Recording

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This 1-hour interactive, peer-to-peer workshop featured four Mellon TLH Faculty Fellows, Lara Saguisag (College of Staten Island), Jason Hendrickson (LaGuardia Community College), Reiko Tahara (Hunter College), and Cheryl C. Smith (Baruch College). It was an opportunity to have an honest dialogue with students and colleagues about some of the experiments the fellows have been doing to create communities of care in their classrooms. Presentation titles are: “Students Perception of Care in the Classroom” (Saguisag); “Language as (Em)Power(Ment)” (Hendrickson); “Student-led Classrooms as a Practice of Care” (Tahara); and “Poetry as a Practice of Care” (Smith). After the the presentations (10min each), the rest of the hour was spent hearing from participants and engaging in student-centered discussions about creating learning communities of care.

Watch now:

Creating Communities of Care in our Classrooms

This 1-hour interactive, peer-to-peer workshop featured four Mellon TLH Faculty Fellows, Lara Saguisag (College of Staten Island), Jason Hendrickson (LaGuardia Community College), Reiko Tahara (Hunter College), and Cheryl C. Smith (Baruch College).

Accessibility in the Classroom – Insights and Questions from TLH Faculty Fellows

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On September 28, our Fall Cohort of TLH Faculty Fellows convened for the first meeting of the semester to plan public events and contributions to knowledge. I also led a discussion about accessibility in the classroom by talking about why it’s important, what the institutional process is like (i.e. students request services through their campus disability services office, which acts as a liaison between student and teacher) and how that may or may not be effective. According to the National Center for Education statistics, nearly half of students with disabilities end up dropping out before they finish (link opens in a new window). According to one study, stronger self-advocates were more likely to complete their degrees (link opens in a new window), but that puts the onus on students to advocate for their needs semester after semester, which can become a barrier to success.

We started the discussion by first polling our fellows on their knowledge of accessibility accommodations, current experiences teaching disabled students in their courses, and types of accommodation requests.

The fellows rated themselves as generally having average experience with accessibility issues and no-one considered themselves to have very limited knowledge or to be very knowledgeable.

Question 1 results (image link opens to interactive chart)

Continue reading →

TLH Office Hours Recap: Ungrading

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On Tuesday, September 14th, we held virtual TLH Open Office Hours with the Mellon TLH Faculty Fellows. We had 11 participants, who shared their experiences with grading and ungrading (alternative forms of assessment).

Some of the challenges discussed included the tedium of grading in Blackboard; helping students understand how scaffolding works (and that missed assignments can snowball into weaker bigger-stakes assignments); guiding student decisions in co-created assessments; and, more generally, increasing student engagement and self-motivation.

Faculty also shared useful tips and strategies, such as:

  • talking students through HOW and WHY a given type of assessment or type of assignment works can help them understand the mechanics and gain a grasp of how syllabi and even institutions function–learn the unspoken rules and how to navigate them, an especially important skill for those who feel underprepared for college;
  • using group work (and peer review) to help extroverted students manage their speaking-time and help shier students open up (e.g., put all of the “extroverts” in one group and all the “introverts” in a different group);
  • asking students to set goals and learning outcomes for themselves at the beginning of the semester and, later, asking them to self-assess how close they came to achieving those goals (individual and/or collective) by the end of the semester;
  • making connections between the course content and students lives (e.g., ask students what they are most curious about).

I also presented a brief slide deck with some examples of ungrading, which you can view here.

[The cover of the book, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum, appears in the foreground, standing on top of a pile of more copies of the book, in front of a vase of flowers and a window with a view of a red brick building in the background.]

Resources

Mellon TLH Faculty Fellow Michael L. J. Greer kindly shared some further resources with me after the workshop:

  1. an article about self-grading that she used as inspiration for her own ungrading methods (he students do a self-assessment which counts for 15% of their final grade) https://www.hsmitchellbuck.com/2019/08/14/adventures-in-ungrading/
  2. a resource on alternative grading that has been circulating in graduate student circles: https://docs.google.com/document/d/149qAwct6amhY1YnDIxjDKw_6w0AkfpV8hMg515LPRzU/edit

If you’d like to dive in further this semester, there is an #Ungrading Edcamp happening this November 4-6, 2021 (registration is free and the agenda will be informed by what participants are most interested in, so sign up and add your thoughts here).

For further reading, see:

TLH Office Hours Recap: Accessible Course Design and Hybrid Teaching

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On August 31, 2021, TLH held the first office hour session with 9 of our faculty fellows. We kicked off the session with a short, high-level presentation about accessible course design which was followed by a discussion about challenges that professors have encountered while teaching online during the past year, with making their course materials accessible on short notice, providing other accommodations to students, and with technology platforms that are not always accessible or user friendly. During the discussion, faculty fellows shared some of the tools and techniques that have worked well for them and bringing up questions that also informed the topic. Overall, it was a productive hour and we really enjoyed the knowledge-sharing! We added 3 more slides to our presentation with some of the resources. 

Stay tuned for our next TLH Office Hourse, on September 14 at 4 pm. TLH Executive Director, Christina Katopodis will lead a discussion on ungrading and peer review.

TLH Office Hours Accessibility

Jessica Murray, director of digital communications for Transformative Learning in the Humanities (TLH) gives a short presentation for the TLH Faculty Fellows during the first office hours of Fall 2021. Slides with additional resources added after the discussion are available here: bit.ly/TLHAXS

Accessible Course Design and Hybrid Teaching after COVID

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Image: CUNY mascots pose with members of the CUNY Coalition for Students with Disabilities (CCSD) at the 2018 NYC Disability Pride Parade.

The pandemic forced a rapid shift to online teaching, but what will we return to and what will we adapt in the future? Some students have benefited tremendously from a move to online learning, especially those who have difficulty with public transit due to a disability, difficulty affording transportation, or a long commute to class. Other students have struggled with having only online or asynchronous courses and learn best with in-person instruction. Educators have been forced to innovate during the past 18 months under the cloud of the pandemic and its related crises, and with the larger systemic problems that higher education was facing before COVID.  Continue reading →

Toni Cade Bambara’s Pedagogical Practices for Learner-Centered Communities

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This post was written by Contributing Author Sonia Adams, a PhD candidate at St. John’s University who organized an event in TLH’s Spring 2021 series on active learning.

Toni Cade Bambara has greatly impacted my work as an educator and curriculum developer. I admire her commitment to literacy education, creativity, multiculturalism, and social justice. During my undergraduate studies in English, I was fortunate to take literature classes and seminars that exposed me to writers of color from the United States and abroad. However, I noticed a trajectory within many of the required, standardized, and special topic English courses, which privileged White male authors and texts. The western literary canon perpetuates an aesthetic that Bambara referred to as the “Anglo-Saxon tradition” that limited entryway for women and ethnic writers to enter the English curriculum (Bambara, “Summer 1968 SEEK Report). Although there were some gains made in late 1960s and early 1970s in making the curriculum more inclusive, there were some women and ethnic authors who served as ‘minority representatives. In other words, their writings were deemed the standard for the racial, gender, and/or cultural group which they derived from. Bambara foresaw the implications of white patriarchal privileging and minority representation and sought to challenge them as an English Professor, writer, editor, and activist.  Continue reading →

Student Self Portrait Artworks created by LaGuardia Community College students in the workshop Seeing Each Other: Identity Self-Portraits

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Professor Dahlia Elsayed and Professor Liena Vayzman
April 13 and 20, 2021

Kyana Neil

This is a representation of my activist side and my normal side. By bringing art and social justice together, I decided I wanted to remake a famous painting by Norman Rockwell. My head is served on a silver platter, hard to ignore, but I have very vibrant 60s/70s influenced makeup on. I’m surrounded by people laughing and talking, but all of the white people surrounding me have copied my makeup… and now the laughing seems to be more of a “haha we look just like her.” I tried to connect the “Culture Vulture” experience people of color always go through. Famous celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Gwen Stefani are infamously known as Culture Vultures… they wear people’s culture like it’s a costume. (From Asian, Native American, Black people, and much more!) And me a person of color, surrounded by white onlookers is having the first-hand experience of only being a “thing to eat, or to take from.”

Kyana Neil self portrait Continue reading →