Representing two CUNY institutions, Baruch College and Guttman Community College, this panel addresses equity, diversity, and inclusion as related to the college writing classroom.  Instructors from Baruch explore and reflect on the tensions between one of the main goals of first-year writing courses, the learning of (academic) writing conventions, and the desire to promote inclusiveness and diversity through language acquisition, deployment, and creation at Baruch College. Instructors from Guttman describe curricular changes at Guttman Community College grounded in abolitionist and culturally responsive pedagogy and theory, as well as the scholarship and activism of linguistic justice. Recognizing the complex realities of the diverse student body at both Baruch and Guttman, and across CUNY, attendees are encouraged to bring questions, ideas, and current practices, and to participate deeply as we collaborate toward bettering CUNY Composition instruction. ​

How do we do social justice work in the library? Two groups from across CUNY will share their experiences, strategies, and next directions. First, faculty from Queensborough Community College will discuss their Faculty Inquiry Group (FIG) on integrating social justice themes (particularly racial justice and economic justice) into information literacy and library instruction to support curriculum and assignments, while also providing students opportunities for questioning and impacting real world policies and practices. Panelists will discuss the development of the FIG and its activities, as well as their experiences working with social justice in the classroom. Session participants will have the opportunity to collaborate on an activity based on those experiences. Next, colleagues from the Graduate Center will explore libraries as racialized spaces. From the materials we choose to collect, preserve and discard, how we describe, organize, and circulate those materials, to the communities we invite in, exclude, and police, no element of library work is untouched by the systemic inequalities that structure all of social life. Librarians will share an analysis of libraries and racism from our roles in resource sharing, collections, scholarly communications, and personnel management. Following this introduction to the racial stakes in knowledge institutions, participants will engage in an interactive exercise meant to demonstrate the ways white supremacy structures scholarly norms that we too often accept as natural and inevitable.

Puerto Rican Studies (PRS) arose in the midst of a revolutionary era and is rooted in empowering education. Students and grassroots activists successfully struggled for inclusion in curricula that often excluded or negatively skewed the Puerto Rican reality in the U.S. In 2019, PRS reached an important milestone in the academy as it marked a mid-century point of what collective consciousness and action can do to create change in and access to higher education for peoples of all backgrounds. PRS not only empowered Puerto Ricans and Latinxs and equipped students from all walks of life, it revolutionized the academy as a whole with CUNY as ground zero. What you learn about its legacy will surprise you. To contribute to the PRS digital archive, material can be sent to: 50YearsofPRS-CUNY@brooklyn.cuny.edu.

The opening presentation of this session examines choreographer Joan Miller’s signature solos, Pass Fe White (1970) and Homestretch (1972), in the context of her work establishing Lehman College’s dance program in 1970 and in the 1960s/’70s student uprisings more broadly.  The solos “read” the desire to embody idealized, feminine whiteness within a larger critique of structures for accessing national belonging: marriage, celebrity, and education.  Performing her choreography as a form of black study (Moten and Harney 2013), I argue that Miller’s work affirmed the capacity to desire differently, provoking considerations of other terms for belonging in the world. The closing presentation of this session unpacks the transformative shifts in the Dance Program curriculum at Lehman College in the wake of the uprisings of 2020. I will use images, video, and sound to illustrate personal anecdotes that will reveal the potential impact of these curriculum changes, as a student and teacher rooted in Hip Hop culture. We will discuss the failure of multiculturalism to decenter whiteness in curriculum design, and explore how culturally relevant curriculum and critical pedagogy provide more useful frameworks. It will include the insights, challenges, and some solutions for how the Dance Program is navigating this challenging and necessary moment of change.

“Intersectionality in Practice: Feminist Pedagogy and Praxis in the Classroom” responds to the call for faculty to reconceptualize pedagogy and teaching methods that consciously address issues related to women, gender, and sexuality studies in the community college curriculum and learning space. It considers intersectionality as an integrative framework that can be used by faculty to develop and implement an inclusive pedagogy and praxis.

Almost 4 percent of CUNY students are undocumented. What are their experiences and how can faculty and staff most effectively support them? We propose an interactive workshop that combines research findings and research-informed recommendations with discussion and development of strategies and connections among participants. The presentation is grounded in findings from a research project investigating the experience of CUNY undocumented students, funded by the W. T. Grant Foundation and carried out by the workshop organizers and Drs. Amy Hsin at Queens College. Often stereotyped as “Dreamers” and “DACA students”, undocumented CUNY students are, in fact, a very diverse group. They were born in countries all over the world. They differ in their immigration histories and possibilities for legalization. Many do not identify or even reject the label “Dreamer”. We stress this diversity and the need to center student experiences in building an anti-racist CUNY

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There is growing consensus across CUNY to address antiracism. However, faculty and students are grappling with how to put this into practice.  In this session, two strategies to take action towards a more equitable and inclusive CUNY classroom are examined across two liberal arts disciplines:  mathematics and political science.  In the first segment, Prof Sandra Kingan (Department of Mathematics, Brooklyn College) will lead an interactive workshop to demonstrate how small changes in teaching strategies can cultivate an environment of anti-racism, respect and inclusion in the mathematics classroom.  Each strategy by itself seems small, but together they have transformative capability, especially when implemented by multiple faculty within a department.  The second segment will bring together faculty and students from the Department of Political Science at Baruch College engaged in deep content analysis of all course syllabi collected during the Fall 2020 semester.  This first-stage research project aims at understanding how the department is currently collectively addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion issues in our courses, and its results will help identify next steps towards building antiracist structures and practices into our curriculum, pedagogy, and department culture.

CUNY does not have clear guideline against workplace bullying. With the financial condition of CUNY dwindles, workplace tension raises. Many suffered workplace bullying. The presentation focuses on the development of activism through personal suffering to launch policy shifting effort at CCNY and CUNY from 2018-2020 and beyond to evaluate the result of such effort and envision the future resolution to the issue.

This roundtable explores a Freshman Seminar at Queens College, designed to foster first generation student success through course content that emphasizes anti-racism, diversity and inclusion. TA Škrijelj explains her units of the seminar, organized around readings on inequality in higher education, linked to a diversity-conscious exploration of key moments in US history. Faculty member Simerka describes the use of peer models as a tool for freshman empowerment: her units featured presentations from students in the QC Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program. Pedagogy sessions often include excerpts from student work as data. Instead, this roundtable gives voice to the students, with five brief presentations that demonstrate their mastery of and passion for topics ranging from #BLM, to linguistic discrimnation in classroom settings, to microaggression in K-12 and med school settings. The round table concludes with an analysis of the seminar’s successes and consideration of future improvements. 

Students choose dance class for many reasons, usually variations on “because it’s required”. The problem with existing Dance Appreciation texts is their focus on western concert dance forms such as ballet and modern. My decolonization practice relies on movements from many sources to gain a deeper understanding of dance as a social, cultural, and kinesthetic experience. In this workshop, I will guide the participants through a movement-based lecture and offer suggestions they can apply to their classes. Dance matters; it is an everyday experience that connects us.

Like dance, music is a connective tissue among communities. As the faculty in my department began to seek healing in our community through decolonizing our curriculum, we realized that our auditions were barring many potential music majors from even beginning our program. In considering what musics our prospective students learn to love in their communities and high schools, we developed a new BA track in American Music and Culture. Our presentation will discuss the challenges of creating and implementing this program.

Humor is a helpful defense mechanism to cope with adversity or trauma; however, it can also be a smoke screen for discrimination in the form of microaggression. The history of the Italian in American humor has from the beginning been a source of both solace and bigotry. Stereotypes were created allowing American humor to birth and foster a culture of discrimination against Italians. This panel will explore how the subtlety of humor continues to encourage prejudice against Italian Americans, whose place as an affirmative action group within CUNY remains fragile due to the widespread acceptance of such behavior. This presentation will include an overview of such humor in the media, a review of the history of humor from the perspective of Italian American studies, and conclude with an analysis of the meanings of humor from a psychological perspective and how humor contributes or detracts from diversity and inclusion.

Among the many strengths of CUNY, and of Baruch College in particular, is the vast cultural and linguistic diversity represented within its student populations, including the unique ambition and insight these multilingual students bring to their quest for a degree. However, there remains an urgent need for ongoing language support for multilingual students within CUNY. Presenters will demonstrate how a one-of-a-kind academic support program at Baruch, Tools for Clear Speech, serves as a replicable model for improving the oral communication skills of this diverse population. Following an overview of current research in the oral communication challenges many multilingual students face in higher education, the presenters will argue for CUNY-wide involvement in student success by empowering faculty of all disciplines to make their language and teaching practices more accessible to English language learners and non-native English speakers. 

Two CUNY campuses have created methods of tackling the pervasive challenge of systemic and structural racism in criminal justice, health care, and education that has been starkly exposed by the pandemic. The first, Bronx Community College, has engaged its faculty, staff and students by creating the BCC Social Justice Network (SJN). Sick and tired of being sick and tired of performative solidarity statements and status quo curricula, the SJN came together to enact socially-just practices and civic engagement activities. As a result, the SJN supported over a two dozen initiatives in the Fall of 2020 and Spring 2021. SJN members, will first share their experiences and identify the continued institutional challenges to social justice initiatives they encountered. The second example is from Queens College where presenters will discuss the inception and existence of the Black Latinx Faculty and Staff Association and the purpose of initiating an antiracist academy while fostering a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community of administration, scholars, and learners. They will examine how Critical Race Theory (CRT) can be centered through the recreation of organizational systems with power, curricula, and understanding the experiences of the communities that remain at risk of exposure to the novel coronavirus.

Mounting evidence suggests that Hispanic and African-American college students have lower sense of belonging to scientific areas of study, mainly impacted by a disconnect between their social and classroom experiences. Pedagogical approaches that increase access of students to learning in the sciences can reverse this trend. In this interactive workshop, we propose to offer practical solutions for modifying the syllabus and course materials in a format that welcomes and includes all our students. Here, we consider inclusivity in all forms, from decolonizing the syllabus to providing access to all students addressing mounting demands for racial justice reform. The workshop is intended as a conversation and asks faculty to consider the lived experiences of their diverse student body, examine their own assumptions about race and accessibility to education and resources, and consider new ways of making courses more inclusive for all students whether in the classroom or on a digital platform.

As BMCC has worked in recent years to develop a strategic plan that designs for success, and because that plan includes a priority to “demonstrate leadership and a commitment to increase equity, foster inclusion, and dismantle systematic racism,,” a group of BMCC students, staff, and faculty from the BMCC Learning Academy (BLA) participated in a series of Fall 2020 workshops to interrogate the extent to which participant students have experienced and could identify examples of equity, inclusion, and anti-racism in their classes at BMCC. This panel presentation will include details on developing “You Are the Expert” workshops, implementation, and reflections from students on the experience of thinking about inequality, identity, pedagogy, and how to practice anti-racism inside and outside classrooms.

Collaborative International Online Learning (COIL) provides opportunities for students to investigate global realities from a cross-cultural perspective.  In a time when acquiring global competencies is vital for the development of an individual and the Corona pandemic discourages face-to-face instruction, virtual exchange through COIL projects connects campuses in different parts of the world.  This presentation is a report from Fujimoto and Gokcora who incorporated the COIL project into their curriculum. The Japanese discussion COIL project promotes active discussion between Queens College (QC) and Nanzan University students in Japan on the topic of cultural differences, diversity, and discrimination in the advanced language class during Spring 2020. On the other hand, at BMCC, immigrant students worked on two major projects with the students at the University of The Bahamas which required them to compare their college education experiences reflecting on Rodriguez’s “The Achievement of Desire” and make an oral presentation by selecting an authentic social injustice topic in their home culture.  The results show that technological tools motivated students to engage in collaborative learning and created meaningful student learning opportunities

Pure Love is a two-part, performance-led workshop that explores how we can thoughtfully incorporate race, gender, and other elements of identity into music. In the first part of the interactive workshop, participants will be asked to contribute reactions to the piece “Prema” (1978) by Alice Coltrane and compare their listening experiences before and after learning more about Coltrane’s background. Jackson will illustrate how she came to interpretative decisions based upon her own research on the composer and time period.

The second part will discuss the York College Community Jam Session, hosted by Zlabinger since 2017. After running a jazz-centric session for years, Zlabinger decided to host a more open session that would focus on anyone interested in jamming, emphasizing inclusion by welcoming instruments and voices of any background and ability. Music during the session is spontaneously created and all sounds are welcome, as long as all present are encouraged to contribute. Zlabinger will share anecdotes from session participants.

Jackson and Zlabinger will draw connections between Coltrane’s work and the spirit of the jam session. The workshop will conclude with a live improvisation by Jackson and Zlabinger.

This panel features faculty, staff, and students from the Borough of Manhattan Community College and Guttman Community College who will offer a curricular and cocurricular approach to fostering student belonging, both of which center around shifting students from passive learners to active participants in the creation and dissemination of knowledge and understanding. BMCC will demonstrate a curricular approach of how faculty can collaborate with Career Services to implement career advisement in the classroom through specific interventions to increase engagement such as LinkedIn, group-based problem solving, and the contextualization of course materials. Also, the use of podcasting in Native American/Indigenous literature courses will be presented as a means of further validating student voices and experiences. Guttman and its chapter of Phi Theta Kappa (PTK) Honor Society will present their cocurricular Amplifying Student Voices initiative. The shift to remote learning has resulted in decreased student belonging and interaction, which has compounded stereotypical thinking because of fewer opportunities to build mutual understanding and empathy. In response, PTK members created a student-run website that culminates in an Ending Single Stories event designed to provide all students with a space to engage in dialogue about their collective diversity and to ensure student’s voice is represented in the larger college community. Attendees will be invited to consider how resources on their campus might support curricular and cocurricular efforts to build an inclusive academy in which students are active knowledge creators.

Many current and potential CUNY students are impacted by the vast reach of the criminal legal system. CUNY’s mission is to provide quality education to all New Yorkers, ensuring equal access and opportunity regardless of background or means. While leadership across CUNY agree upon the importance of serving justice system-impacted students as part of this mission, system-impacted students still experience stigma and barriers on campus. Launched in 2020, the CUNY Justice Learning Collaborative convenes administrators, faculty, staff, and students striving to ensure that CUNY is welcoming and supportive to system-involved students. This panel discussion with students in the Learning Collaborative will explore how system-involved students experience campus life and the assets they bring to their institution. Panelists will also discuss opportunities for higher education to improve the quality of interpersonal, academic and professional interactions to work toward a healthy campus and inclusive climate.

One-half of CUNY’s colleges are designated as Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI’s). An HSI is an eligible institution with an enrollment of at least 25 percent Hispanic undergraduate full-time equivalent students. As a federally designated HSI, these campuses are eligible for grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education (USDE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). In fact, in 2014-2015, the top five institutions for enrolling Hispanic undergraduates in New York were all CUNY schools. It is crucial to develop and support best practices supporting CUNY faculty will share experiences and initiatives, discuss challenges, and identify growth areas on our campuses. Developing an HSI identity can create safe spaces for Latinx faculty and students to share mentorship, scholarship, and experiential experiences for Latinx students. CUNY faculty will share experiences and initiatives, discuss challenges, and identify growth areas on our campuses