By Jacob Aplaca

Teaching matters at CUNY.

This is what I tend to say when asked about what makes getting a PhD at The Graduate Center so unique and so valuable an experience.

This is, of course, a deceptively simple reply. Yes, “teaching matters at CUNY,” just as it does at a number of other institutions across the country. But here teaching matters in relation to a number of specific factors: our history of open admissions, our status as public university system in one of the world’s most diverse cities, and the material constraints that contextualize everything we do as instructors in this institution today. And then there is also my own personal attachment. I love teaching, I love my discipline (English), and my time spent at the front of the classroom has been a welcomed reprieve from the more isolating aspects of doctoral study.

In light of the central place teaching holds in my life and the lives of my colleagues, I found Jean Amaral’s exploration of “open pedagogy” during the Open Pedagogy Fellowship  Boot Camp in January a gratifying and enlightening experience.

Open pedagogy  has been defined in a number of ways. For some, Open Pedagogy begins with Open Educational Resources (OER), which are “free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes.” While this is certainly important, especially at a public university where students often do not have much money to spend on expensive textbooks, Jean pointed out that this was only a small part of a larger picture.

Open Pedagogy really starts with praxis, asking instructors to consider how “theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures.” In doing so, instructors will hopefully develop courses and learning materials that prioritize accessibility, broadly defined. This means not only incorporating zero-cost and OER materials accessible to both able-bodied and differently-abled students, but also creating new, openly-licensed learning materials that can be easily shared.

Open Pedagogy also entails rethinking the classroom, moving away from a teacher-centered learning environment to one that is not simply student-centered, but learner-driven. It is one thing to say that we have “flipped” our classrooms; it is quite another thing to actually build into our syllabi that kind of flexibility and openness necessary for students to make meaningful modifications to the shape and content of our courses.

Furthermore, rethinking the classroom requires that we look beyond it, making the materials, assignments, and (with their permission) student work generated therein objects of public knowledge, able to contribute to the pedagogy and learning of those both within and outside of the CUNY system. This sort of openness means first rejecting learning management systems (LMS) like Blackboard, and migrating course assignments and openly-licensed learning materials to an open platform like the CUNY Academic Commons. It also means rejecting a pervasive culture of isolation and secrecy in the development, teaching, and evaluation of our courses.

Overall, sounds pretty easy, right?

Not necessarily. As part of the Open Pedagogy Fellowship, I have been tasked with incorporating these practices and materials into my own teaching. In doing so, I have been astounded by how many of my own pedagogical habits of mind run up against many features of Open Pedagogy. For example, it has been hard for me to give up my sense of total control in the classroom. And, being the worrier that I am, the idea of making my pedagogical resources and teaching strategies available online has produced no small amount of anxiety in my life.

However, there has also been a remarkable upside. While it has not been long—and I must admit that my class is not yet fully “open”—there has already been a shift. Having committed myself to a model of learner-driven discussion and afforded my students the necessary agency to interrogate my course content and make real adjustments, I have noticed in my students a level of investment in their learning I have never seen before. What is more, I have noticed in my students an investment in one another. During class discussion, students are no longer just talking to me as if the opinion of the instructor is the only one that matters.

So even though I still have work to do, I am proud of the openness of my course thus far. Again and again, my students are demonstrating their willingness to rise to the occasion. I also believe in the zero-cost and open-access materials I have incorporated and developed for my class. They are available, and I hope people use them. And, finally, I hope my experiences encourage other instructors to contribute to the project of Open Pedagogy at CUNY and beyond.

Jacob Aplaca is a third-year PhD student in the English program at the GC and a teaching fellow at Hunter College. His current research focuses on figurations of queer loss and melancholia in 20th and 21st-century literatures. In his spare time, he indulges in writing bad poetry, some of which can be found in PANK Magazine and Yes Poetry, and complains about adjunct life on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

By Jaime Shearn Coan

In her influential 1991 essay, “Theorizing Deviant Historiography,” scholar Jennifer Terry wrote: “the new archivist is on the street, in the thick of things, occupying a mobile subject position” (286). For some, this image may feel incongruous. For others however, the conjuncture of activism and archives is a familiar and necessary one. Polly Thistlethwaite, the Chief Librarian at The Graduate Center, an ACT UP alumni, and a fierce advocate of open access, fully embodies Terry’s ideal.

On January 10, 2019, the first day of Open Educational Resources (OER) Bootcamp, Thistlethwaite delivered a talk, complete with personal photos, titled, “How We Got to Open Access: An Activist’s Tale.” Right away, she made clear that origin narratives are contradictory and often dangerous, and offered up her version within the context of more dominant takes on how OA has come to be what it is today.

In 1986, Thistlethwaite held the dual positions of being librarian at an academic institution and a member of ACT UP. Access to medical information published by journals that could only be accessed by institutions with subscriptions was being sought by activists and PLWA’s [People Living with AIDS] in order to save their own and others’ lives. It was at this time that Thistlethwaite saw clearly that “access to medical, government, and scholarly communication is a human right.” At that time, the latest medical studies could only be accessed in terminals at the library; the consequent emergence of electronic resources, she explained, although seemingly a step in the right direction, did not actually increase access for those unaffiliated with academic institutions due to the prohibitive costs of subscription fees and paywalls.

Making the link between the early years of the AIDS Crisis and our contemporary moment (a link that not all early AIDS activists have been able to make), Thistlethwaite stressed that the emphasis should be not only on the origins of Open Access, but also about “where we are now.” And where we are, she argues, thanks to publisher profiteering, is a time in which “readers are in emergency.”

Although much of my own work takes place at the intersection of AIDS, archives, activism, and performance, Thistlethwaite’s presentation helped me to comprehend the stakes at play– historically and presently–when it comes to advocating for open access. Now that I have more awareness of the political thrulines of this work, I feel committed to working towards making my own scholarship and teaching materials public, and to seeking out opportunities for exchange, advocacy, and skill-building over the course of my academic career.

This semester, with guidance from the amazing librarians and technicians who led the OER Bootcamp, I have built a modest course site for my “Writing About Performance” class at Queens College. It’s not quite OER yet, as many of my readings are copyright-protected, and therefore password-protected, but it does allow for an unfolding of the course to take place in the public sphere in real time. The syllabus and course schedule are posted, students post blog entries every week, and I have invited two students a week to post “reviews” of the class so that a sense of the class as an event can be accessed by anyone. I haven’t talked about ACT UP with my students (yet), or about contemporary social justice movements, but I hope that the course’s content and form not only reflects, but also produces, resistant and visionary modes of knowledge. Even if the initiating factors of the practices we carry with us aren’t always visible, they are doing work that we can’t yet measure, here in “the thick of things” which is our now.

References and Further Reading

“Bibliography: Women, AIDS, & Activism,” (1990). By Polly Thistlethwaite, CUNY Graduate Center. Via CUNY Academic Works. Full book available on HathiTrust. Accessed Feb 28, 2019. 

“Jaime Shearn Coan in conversation with Mariana Valencia,” Critical Correspondence, September 23, 2016.

“Crucial Circulations: VHS and Queer AIDS Archives,” The Center for the Humanities Blog, August 10, 2018.

Jaime Shearn Coan is a writer and PhD candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Digital Publics Fellow at The Center for the Humanities. His critical writing on performance has appeared in publications including TDR: The Drama Review, Critical Correspondence, Drain Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Bodies of Evidence, and Women & Performance. He is the co-editor of the 2016 Danspace Project Platform catalogue: Lost and Found: Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now.

By Adashima Oyo

“If the structure does not permit dialogue the structure must be changed”

― Paulo Freire

Over the last decade, student enrollment at City University of New York (CUNY) has significantly increased. As the largest urban university in the United States, CUNY enrolls more than 500,000 (degree and non-degree) students each year across its 25 campuses. CUNY employs a significant number of first-time and repeat adjuncts to teach undergraduate and graduate courses in various disciplines. Many of these adjuncts are PhD students from the CUNY Graduate Center. Several adjuncts who are teaching across CUNY campuses are balancing their own doctoral course load, working full-time or part-time positions off campus, and navigating college level teaching positions for the first time. New adjuncts may struggle and face barriers as they balance multiple demands from teaching students while being a student themselves.

That said, research indicates students taught by adjunct faculty report greater engagement in coursework, learn more in introductory courses, and are more inclined to take additional advanced courses after instruction from an adjunct, regardless of the subject (Figlio, Schapiro, & Soter, 2015). This finding is not particularly surprising, since many adjuncts work hard to ensure that students enrolled in their class have the best possible learning experience. This is a good thing. After all, given that adjunct faculty teach greater than three-quarters of college courses, they have considerable influence over the learning environments and outcomes of students.

 Many adjuncts employ creative methods to keep students engaged with critical pedagogy and the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). Each semester, students enrolled in my class at Brooklyn College are shocked and happy to discover that there is no assigned textbook. This doesn’t mean there are no assigned readings. Rather, students are provided with resources from peer-reviewed journals, TEDTalks, news articles, documentaries, and many other resources that can offer the same ideas that are found in an over-priced textbook. For example, during our class discussion about great public health achievements, I show students images from the 1950s of medical doctors endorsing cigarettes, and ask students to reflect on the process that needed to occur for there to be a recognition that tobacco use is a health hazard.

In addition to there being no textbook, some students feel performance anxiety upon learning there is also no midterm or final exam for the class. While it is far easier on me to simply create a multiple choice exam that can be quickly graded, students are instead tasked with writing “reaction papers” that critique the ideas we discuss in class and facilitating teach backs to the class. In these presentations, students talk about the social determinants of health. They discuss the impact of housing, racism, transportation, education and many other factors that contribute to healthcare and health status. The idea for these assignments are that students are experts, too. There doesn’t have to be 100% reliance and acceptance of the ideas that are written by the “scholars.”

Often times, students share their ideas with each other through group discussions and think-pair-share activities. Some of my peers, who are also adjuncts and PhD students, have shared their experiences with letting students design parts of the syllabus, having students develop the final exam or encouraging students to use their smartphones and laptops during the class. Certainly, all of these methods don’t work for all subjects. When done right, many of these methods require extensive preparation and planning for the adjunct.

Further, considering that some colleges staff adjuncts at the last minute (days before a class is slated to start) or the fact that many adjuncts are teaching more than one course at multiple CUNY colleges, doing the research to incorporate OER materials or utilizing critical pedagogy can be a struggle. This can cause adjuncts to feel burned out. While doctoral students from the CUNY Graduate Center have access to the Teaching and Learning Center, many adjuncts require additional support and guidance from the academic departments of the schools where they instruct.

As previously stated, new adjuncts may struggle and face barriers as they balance multiple demands from teaching students while being a student themselves. This may result in feelings of dissatisfaction with their teaching position, which may translate to the classroom and learning experiences of their undergraduate and graduate students who attend CUNY. It is of critical importance that adjuncts receive the support and encouragement to use OER materials and critical pedagogies in the classroom, but they must also have the support and courage for self-care outside of the classroom. This is no easy balance.

References                                               

Figlio, D. N., Schapiro, M. O., & Soter, K. B. (2015). Are tenure track professors better teachers?. Review of Economics and Statistics, 97(4), 715-724.

Adashima Oyo is a PhD student in the Social Welfare program at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She earned both a Master of Public Health (MPH) and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Brooklyn College, CUNY. Her research interests explore the impact of the “minority-majority” demographic shift on health disparities. Adashima is also interested in examining the impact of the glaring lack of racial diversity among doctoral students, faculty and executive-level leadership in higher education. In addition to working as the Director of HASTAC Scholars, she is part of the adjunct faculty at New York University (NYU) and Brooklyn College, CUNY where she teaches courses about healthcare and developing research papers to undergraduate students. Adashima is also a Futures Initiative Fellow and Silberman Doctoral Fellow. #BlackScholarsMatter

By Mary Jean McNamara

This spring will be my second semester teaching “Tyranny, Democracy, and Empire,” at Brooklyn College. The course introduces students to both ancient and modern texts that examine human rights and political participation, and the selection of readings includes excerpts from Homer, Sophocles, Hobbes, Locke, and Mill. After finishing the course last semester, I felt students had an understanding of the main points of the respective works but I felt there was a gap between what I thought the students took away from the texts, and what they actually took away from the texts.  Looking for ways to make the texts more accessible, I applied to the Library’s Open Pedagogy Fellowship program.

When I told one of my advisors that I was taking a course in ‘open pedagogy,’ she asked, “What is that?” Her confusion about the openness of resources is understandable. The teaching of Classics and the idea of open anything is marred by a long history of exclusivity. Going back to 92 BCE when the Roman quaestors closed a school that offered training in rhetoric for students with no knowledge of Greek, access to the Greek and Roman authors has been linked to privilege.

Restricting access is at odds with the themes and issues explored in the early texts of Greece and Rome. For instance, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex has continued to enjoy universal appeal. Going back to the initial production of the play, it was originally performed in Athens as part of an annual festival which all citizens were expected to attend. Theater in ancient Athens served as a common platform where the citizen and the occasional non-citizen would engage in the important questions of their day. The theater provided both a stage and a forum where performance and participation mingled side by side.

Like the theater in Athens, I am hoping that my students can use the course website as if it was their version of the Athenian theater. My hope is that interacting on the website will yield more engaged participation in the political environment that goes beyond the confines of the classroom.  In an article that appeared in The Guardian, Edith Hall, professor of Classics at King’s College, argues for the relevance of reading texts such as the Iliad or Oedipus Rex in an era in which more and more students enroll in math and science courses. Hall’s argument for expanded access to Classics rests on her belief that the Greeks were unique in their ability to form questions based on their experience. Likewise, I am hoping that the OER-based platform will encourage students to form questions based on their experiences, both inside and outside of the classroom.

Mary Jean McNamara is a second-year doctoral student in Classics. Her interests include early Greek citizenship, political organization in archaic Greece, and the reception of Athenian democracy. She is currently teaching a course at Brooklyn College entitled “Tyranny, Democracy, and Empire” and is grateful for the opportunity to learn about new ways of connecting students with the study of ancient Greek political theory.