CUNY

The York College-hosted NASA MAA (MUREP AEROSPACE ACADEMY) has always played a pivotal role in minimizing the learning loss during the summer months, which was heightened during the pandemic. Support from AT&T, Con Edison and NASA enabled the MAA program at York College to offer a virtual STEM education with basic science and python-based concentration to 1000 plus underserved K1-12 students from the community last summer, including 160 high school students.

“I came to explore the wreck,” Adrienne Rich begins in her poem “Diving into the Wreck,” and tumbles to the depths of her questions about efficacy—of speaking, of writing, and of teaching—during a time when students activists shut down campuses across the country, striking for anti-racist education policies from curriculum design to admissions. With a desire to connect our students at Brooklyn and Queens College with the history of student activism at CUNY, we developed a semester long peer-peer writing exchange to take place between our composition classes where our students developed and exchanged writing prompts inspired by Rich’s archival teaching material. By having our students document and record the unfolding of their written exchange, we argue that this type of collaborative project offers a new way of conceiving how participants in a classroom can build, envision, and record new ways of learning. As every classroom leaves behind an archive of writing, notes, and lesson plans, we ask, what do we do with the written materials we and our students leave behind, the materials that signal the embodied work of building a space of learning? How can the work that students leave behind inspire and enact its own unique pedagogy? This paper will present the unfolding of our students’ writing exchange, ultimately demonstrating that the archive of materials left behind by Rich and our own project can further inspire students and instructors to question what is possible while living and working in the ever-shifting space of the writing classroom.

Students interested in geosciences, for the most part, missed out their traditional field-based research activities due to strict social distancing, travel restrictions and/or lacking financial support. An absence of physical laboratory opportunities forced underserved students (Image 1) to choose topics deemed doable through online research and python-based programming language. Available data from online sources on extreme weather-related case studies, temperature fluctuations, flooding, droughts, groundwater depletion in urban and suburban areas, coastal erosion rate, sea level rise, landslides, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and atmospheric pollution became quite handy and lucrative. Readily available pertinent data sources enabled K9-16 students to conduct summer research at "stay home" situations (Image 2 through 10).

In the drive toward institutionalization, Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs have had a tendency to standardize WAC practices, making them less flexible than they were first intended to be.  As a result, when faculty, particularly those new to WAC, express hesitation or skepticism, their concerns are often dismissed as resistance.  Interviews with Writing Intensive (WI) course instructors, year-long partnerships with WI faculty across disciplines, and a recent semester-long faculty development workshop revealed instances of faculty “resistance,” which lead us not only to re-evaluate “resistance,” but also to consider what guidelines facilitate broader and deeper engagement with WAC.  Based on our unique experience as doctoral Writing Fellows in the WAC program at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York, we argue that so-called “resistances” are often justified criticisms and concerns in regard to implementing WAC under given institutional, disciplinary, departmental, and personal constraints.  If we listen and respond to these criticisms and concerns, they become means to facilitate faculty engagement with WAC.  Based on our findings, we re-assert the premise that WAC practices and programs must be flexible (a) to accommodate the conditions under which faculty teach and (b) to encourage ownership of WAC, which together promote deep-rooted pedagogical change, which is the ultimate goal of most WAC programs.

Many colleges and universities have adopted core competencies during the last two decades. Their adoption reflects larger national trends in outcomes assessment, teaching and learning, and regional accreditation. Faculty at LaGuardia Community College sought model assignments with reflections on their design that speak to the college’s core competencies—integrative learning, inquiry and problem-solving, and global learning—and the communication abilities that students use to express them—written, oral, and digital communication abilities. In response, the college’s assessment leaders looked to the assignment library created by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) for inspiration. They developed the Learning Matters Assignment Library, a curated collection of openly licensed assignments written by LaGuardia faculty in different disciplines that aligned with the college’s Core Competencies and Communication Abilities. The collection features staged and mostly high-stakes assignments for courses in all levels and subjects, including English, photography, theater, psychology, biology, mathematics, chemistry, radiologic and veterinary technologies, and physical therapy—the many flavors of the Learning Matters Assignment Library. LaGuardia’s Library Media Resources Center houses this special collection of open educational resources (OER) in the institutional repository, provides metadata, and assists with Creative Commons licensing.