In this essay, we share our experience co-teaching “Activism and the College Experience: From Anti-Fascism to #MeToo,” an in-person cultural studies course offered at The City College of New York (CCNY) in the Spring of 2022.2 The course materials and pedagogy were designed to address certain patterns that seemed to have solidified as part of the post-pandemic educational landscape, such as lingering feelings of disconnect, challenges in socializing, and shorter attention spans. During the semester, we introduced students to a range of perspectives on community activism, beginning with the history of student-led movements on the CCNY campus in the context of the international conflict between totalitarianism and democracy that preceded WWII. At the heart of the course was a semester-long archival recovery project that brought together place-based learning and digital pedagogy to help foster a learning community engaged with CCNY’s history of activism. As instructors and students became co-learners and co-creators, the process of community building took place in concentric circles. The text was situated at the center, nested in three consecutive circles, each representing the campus, the neighborhood, and the city. We conceive these circles as linking the student experience in the classroom with local Harlem history, and national and transnational activism, respectively.
Activism and the College Experience
For over a century, CCNY has been a staging ground for transformative activism: from the establishment of its 1907 chapter of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society to the organizing efforts behind the Five Demands issued by Black and Puerto Rican student groups that successfully pushed the institution toward its Open Admissions policy in 1969, and extending to the present, with ongoing student-led mobilizations continuing to advance collective action for racial justice and accessible education (“student rebels” n.d.; Fabricant and Brier 2016; Weiss and Schiller 2023).3 Likewise, CCNY, like other colleges across the City University of New York (CUNY), has been, and continues to be, a site for developing and implementing radical pedagogies that leverage education as a tool for social change (Rich 2013; Chatlosh 2020; Reed 2023; Savonick 2024). In the context of this rich history of activism, our class project aligns with other Open Educational Resources (OER) developed to preserve and teach CUNY’s history, such as the CUNY Digital History Archive, Project 1969, and Lost & Found’s Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974. These initiatives—largely shaped by contributions from CUNY students—document and celebrate the university’s storied history and connect current constituencies to this legacy and its reverberations across and beyond the institution.
Designed to interrogate the connections between the political activism of college students in the 1930s and the 2000s, the course description began with two framing questions: “What does it mean to be a politically committed individual in the 21st century?” and “How do you engage with and contribute to both campus life and the well-being of our local communities?” The course’s primary objective was to connect past and present by examining the political activism of the 1930s alongside contemporary movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter (BLM), and #MeToo, allowing historical and contemporary struggles to illuminate and inform each other. Cross-listed with the History, Political Science, English, and Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures departments, the class brought together students with diverse interests, skills, and career goals to consider their participation in shaping society through activism.
The reading assignments provided foundational knowledge about both historical periods, equipping students with the tools to understand the object of our archival recovery and turn their knowledge into praxis. These assignments, which required students to respond through reflection papers, included contemporary critiques of neoliberal democracies (e.g., Jaques Rancière’s “Democracies Against Democracy,” Giorgio Agamben’s “Introductory Note on the Concept of Democracy,” and Wendy Brown’s “We Are All Democrats Now…”), alongside secondary sources on historical struggles for democracy such as Irving Howe’s Worlds of Our Fathers and Peter N. Carroll’s The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War. The latter texts introduced students to political concepts and ideologies—Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, and Fascism, among others—that, while central to contemporary debates, were only marginally familiar or completely foreign to them. These readings laid the groundwork for our semester-long class project, which involved digitizing, editing, publishing, and annotating Let My People Know: The Story of Wilfred Mendelson (“Mendy”), Student Leader, Organizer, Journalist, Anti-Fascist Soldier Who Fell in Spain July 28, 1938,4 a 90-page pamphlet held in the Special Collections section of the CCNY Cohen Library documenting the life and combat sacrifice of a former student of the college. Through this place-based renewable assignment—“an activity in which students are invited to openly license and publicly share the artifact that is created, which has value beyond the students' own learning”—we achieved the goal of drawing the class closer to the student experience, making them feel closer to the historical processes they were learning throughout the semester (Katz and Van Allen n.d.).
Let My People Know
Let My People Know is a unique document chronicling the experiences of the CCNY volunteers who fought and died in the Spanish Civil War, and, as such, it serves as a teaching tool to reflect on the role of college students in shaping our contemporary democracy. While thousands of pages have been written about the Civil War and the more than 35,000 volunteers from all over the world who fought in support of Spanish democracy between 1936 and 1938, Let My People Know offers current CCNY students a distinctive perspective on their institution’s history—one that intertwines local and transnational activism.
The text provides students an entry point beyond master narratives and traditional historical accounts of the fight against Fascism in the 1930s that they might encounter in history textbooks. Instead, it allows them to connect with the lived experiences of previous generations of college students through a form of local knowledge production. For instance, the pamphlet’s “City College Caudron” essay documents a first-hand account of CCNY students’ reactions to Fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in the fall of 1935: “1,000 students turned out to a protest rally in the Lewisohn Stadium. Wilfred [Mendelson], in the name of the Society for Student Liberties, introduced the resolution condemning the invasion. Later, he argued for such action in a letter to [the CCNY newspaper] The Campus” (Mendelson 1942). As Eric L. Ball and Alice Lai argue, such forms of marginalized cultural productions are conducive to a “radically place-based pedagogy”: by integrating the pamphlet into the curriculum as an object of academic study, it gained legitimacy typically reserved for authoritative or canonical texts, highlighting the value of local, individual voices in humanities education (2006, 262).
Wilfred Mendelson, “Mendy” (1915–1938), was one of thirteen CCNY students, faculty, and staff volunteers—out of a total of sixty—who died fighting in support of democracy during the Spanish Civil War. Despite lacking military training, his secret trip to Spain marked the culmination of a life devoted to championing civil rights and defending freedom. Like many CCNY students in the 1930s, he was the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who had settled in the Lower East Side of New York City. As we learn from the pamphlet, Mendy grew up immersed in the vibrant labor movement that arose from the systemic discrimination faced by the Jewish working class in Eastern Europe. He devoured texts such as R. P. Dutt’s World Politics, James Allen’s The Negro Question in the United States, and V. I. Lenin’s Two Tactics, and April Theses, among others. Before joining the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—the formal name of the US volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War—Mendy had already emerged as a charismatic leader who had written about the threat of fascism in college publications and delivered lectures across New York City advocating for freedom of speech in the United States. Four years after his death, his classmates and fellow volunteers came together to honor and memorialize him by publishing his letters and political writings.
The Let My People Know pamphlet opens with a biographical account written by Mendy’s friends, which contextualizes his writings and offers a detailed portrait of his life, including his time as a CCNY college student from 1931 to 1935, when he was expelled for his subversive political activities. This section situates Mendy’s activism within the broader socio-political environment of the 1930s. The subsequent sections include letters of notable interest written by Mendy from the Spanish front. These first-hand accounts blend his personal, political, and cultural perceptions of the conflict.
Let My People Know was collaboratively written and self-published by a group of CCNY students in the summer and fall of 1942. The expression “To you we write it” (emphasis added) is repeated several times in the ‘Foreword,’ an interpellation that underlines both the collaborative nature of the original publication and its call to its imagined community of readers to join a struggle that, by then, had seen the United States enter World War II. By passing on Mendy’s and their own experience to future generations of CCNY students, the text aims to perpetuate the intergenerational knowledge constitutive of the cultural commons that define a “place”—a form of subjugated knowledge that, especially in college curricula, is often overshadowed by “big history” (Yemini et al. 2023, 3). In a similarly collaborative spirit, the students in the course followed in the footsteps of Mendy’s friends, actualizing the text by digitizing, annotating, and recontextualizing it. This process invited them to act as mediators between Mendy and the contemporary reader, effectively becoming both bearers and producers of knowledge.
Our students’ engagement with this project fostered a sense of ownership and school spirit, as the concentric circle structure that informed our pedagogy was built around the text itself. Current CCNY students, many of whom commute to school from around the larger New York City area while working to support themselves and their families, often lack the opportunity to be invested in campus life, learn about institutional history, and develop pride in its legacy—opportunities more readily available to students at residential colleges. By emphasizing in-class group work to counteract the separation imposed by the pandemic, we positioned the classroom as the first concentric circle. Let My People Know offered us the singular opportunity to connect students with a foundational chapter in CCNY’s history—the campus forming the second circle—while situating it within the broader context of the 1930s labor movement in New York City, with the city representing the third circle. The pamphlet thus integrates three dimensions of the local (the campus, the neighborhood, and the city) into a transnational narrative about the fight against authoritarianism. In 2022, the interconnectedness of these three spaces, as embodied by the politically impactful student generation of the 1930s, allowed our students to step into their symbolic roles as representatives of this legacy.
The class was fascinated by the stories in the text and recognized its resonance with contemporary struggles for political accountability and social justice. As one student observed, “Mendy’s story is one of direct action that could inspire other people his age today” (Matonte in Sirett 2022). In the context of our place-based digital pedagogy, the wealth of information about student activism in the text invited us to reflect comparatively on students’ political responsibility in the present and to engage with the history of our institution, bridging the divide between the first and second circles in our model (the classroom and the college). First, a retrospective look at the college as a haven for first- and second-generation New Yorkers in the first half of the 20th century reinforced CCNY’s current identity and validated our students’ diverse ethnic, racial, religious, and socioeconomic subject positions. Second, Let My People Know underscores the importance of the coalitional politics that continue to shape activism on the CCNY campus today, as evidenced by the diverse range of identities represented in the student body involved in the pro-Palestine encampment established in Spring 2024 on the North Campus Quad. The pamphlet, in fact, not only documents the political activism of (mainly) Jewish students but also highlights their strong bonds of solidarity with African American communities in the 1930s5—locally in Harlem (where the CCNY campus is located), nationally, in the face of systemic discrimination that affected both groups during the decade, and internationally, with US volunteers fighting in integrated ranks in Spain, whereas the official US Army remained segregated for another decade. In so doing, it captures the affinities of their shared struggles, from the Jewish labor movement’s early development in Brooklyn and Manhattan’s Lower East Side to the activism centered in Harlem, both near and on the CCNY campus.6
A DH Framework for Place-Based Pedagogy
Our engagement with DH was not merely an appendix to an otherwise traditional course; rather, it became the means through which we enacted our place-based pedagogy, as the learning outcomes were deeply reliant on building a digital edition of Let My People Know as much as on the principles of openness and collaboration that, as Lisa Spiro suggests, serve as guiding values for the field. Indeed, the principles of Open Pedagogy—“access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education AND as a process of designing architectures and using tools for learning that enable students to shape the public knowledge commons of which they are a part”—guided our approach to teaching the course (Jhangiani and DeRosa n.d.). While the concentric model helped us foster a sense of community within the classroom and campus, building an OER with our students enabled us to extend those circles outward, as the knowledge produced during the semester contributed to writing the history of student activism at CUNY and beyond.
Planning the course began with envisioning a desirable shape and form for the digital edition of Let My People Know—a flexible framework for students to build upon, rather than a rigidly designed blueprint—and then reverse-engineering it to identify the skills students would need to bring it to completion. During the semester, students were then prompted to work on four levels:
- through traditional engagement with literary and historical texts;
- completing hands-on digital assignments to edit and re-publish the pamphlet;
- conducting research and writing critical annotations;
- and curating a set of supplemental resources from the CCNY Digital Collections that documented aspects of campus life, some directly related to events mentioned by Mendy.
Rather than assigning individual tasks to be completed at home, we chose to use as much class time as possible to build a learning community by reading, editing, researching (and even performing text analysis) as social practices, as opposed to isolating endeavors.
To prepare students for the scaffolded assignments leading to the digital edition of Let My People Know, we held hands-on workshops on key topics and tools in DH, including an overview of the possibilities of DH (through a close reading of several digital projects), working with text in digital environments and text analysis, HTML and CSS, and Manifold—the platform we used to publish the project. Each workshop was followed by a class session dedicated to group work, allowing students to practice and apply their skills collaboratively, and by writing prompts that encouraged them to articulate their experiences using these newly acquired skills to complete their assignments. Finally, students engaged with readings that explored the role of technology-informed and web-reliant activism, connecting their use of technology in the classroom with larger socio-political discourses.
The place-based nature of our pedagogy also required us to pay attention to the unique needs of CCNY students and the constraints of the institution itself, such as the minimal presence of infrastructure to support digital projects, which are often sustained by uneven streams of internal and external funding—as was the case with the grant that brought the instructors of this course together—and the persistent digital divide disproportionately affecting the underserved groups that constitute the majority of CUNY’s student population (Moore et al. 2018). Yet, while teaching DH on a “shoestring”—to borrow the phrase from a popular article published in a previous issue of this journal to describe the constraints of DH pedagogy at underfunded institutions such as CCNY—presents logistical and pedagogical challenges, it can also create opportunities to establish pipelines that foster collaboration among various constituencies to mitigate scarcity (Savonick 2022). For example, courses promoting partnerships between archivists, faculty, and students can result in digital projects and OERs based on archival holdings that might otherwise remain undigitized—and thus less accessible and discoverable—due to understaffing or insufficient digital capacity.
Likewise, in educational settings with limited resources, leveraging existing infrastructure that facilitates Open Pedagogy, whether hosted within or beyond one’s institution, is especially crucial. In the context of our course, deploying an open, free, and accessible platform for digital publishing was also essential because of the limited time available to familiarize students with a new tool. Manifold—an open-source publishing platform originally designed to publish scholarly monographs and, in its CUNY-hosted instance, repurposed into a hybrid tool for teachers—proved well-suited to this challenge. Since Manifold “takes its visual and performative cues from the web browser rather than the printed page”, students were able to navigate it with ease, finding its interface intuitive as a result of their familiarity with digital environments (Gold et al. 2022, 278). After reviewing existing Manifold projects to understand the platform’s potential, we adapted and repurposed its social annotation tool to embed our students’ research directly into the reading experience, creating critical annotations that contribute to the text’s contextualization and interpretability for contemporary readers.
Instead of preselecting the textual elements that warranted further research, we let students—acting as surrogates for potential readers of the new edition—decide what required investigation and critical framing. For instance, apart from encountering expressions that were entirely novel to both of us, they were often puzzled by terms and references that we, as instructors, initially took for granted. These included political figures and ideologies (e.g., Nikolai Bukharin, Joseph Stalin, Bolshevism, Marxism), geographic landmarks (Spain’s River Ebro), as well as labor unions in both Spain (e.g., the anarchist and socialist Spanish unions Confederación Nacional del Trabajo and Unión General de Trabajadores) and in New York City (e.g., United Garment Workers, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, New York Student League). This shared editorial authority effectively “flipped” the classroom, empowering students to lead the conversation, tailoring class discussions, their individual research, and, ultimately, the content of the new digital edition of the text.
The Lessons They Learned, The Lessons We Learned
Designing and teaching a course informed by the principles of Open Pedagogy, implemented through DH methods, and centered around a place-based semester-long project helped students develop both transferable skills (such as critical thinking, teamwork, and problem-solving) and hard skills (such as digital literacy, basic coding and web development). Incorporating technical skills in humanities coursework not only fosters a different kind of epistemology (Ramsay and Rockwell 2012; Thompson Klein 2017) but also aligns with the interests of students at CCNY—where the median family income falls below the city’s poverty threshold and which is recognized as the fifth best college for upward mobility of its students in the country (CUNY 2023; “Economic Diversity and Student Outcomes at the City College of New York”)—by equipping them with a broader range of practical tools that can facilitate both economic and social advancement.7
Our end-of-semester evaluations taught us that nearly all the students in the class were gratified by inscribing themselves in the history of the college, as much as they were in acquiring what Keralis et al. call “digital agency,” a forma mentis that “allows students to pivot quickly from being content consumers to knowledge producers, with digital tools providing the means of production, rather than being direct objects of learning in and of themselves” (2021). As one of our students wrote:
I learned how to code, even if it was just the basics, and I will be pursuing more of it in the future [...] This was something entirely new and fresh. Seeing this come to life onto the digital platform, Manifold, was also a new experience. [...] By using digital skills, I am able to have a platform for my historical voice and those whose stories I write about... I would love to see other courses similar to this one in the course roster list.
This sense of accomplishment and enthusiasm for the course’s pedagogy underscores how hard skills and the digital agency acquired during the semester foster (an admittedly selective) technical proficiency,8 a deeper connection to the material, and a sense of purpose in contributing to broader conversations. Furthermore, by engaging in the process of shaping how Mendy’s history will be presented to future readers, students also developed a critical awareness of how the historical narratives they consume are produced.
On the other hand, one of the most significant lessons we learned as teachers is that the labor to complete such OERs often extends beyond the term. In the context of our course, the instructors’ work continued into the summer of 2022, supported by one of the students in the course, who was hired through an internal funding scheme to conduct further research and refine some of the existing annotations; this allowed her to apply the skills she learned in class. It’s important to note that, even if, by the end of the term, the final product doesn’t fully align with the instructor’s publication standards, it is still valuable to publish a preliminary version of the project that can be revised at a later time—doing so provides students with a tangible sense of completion and fulfillment. Further, while instructors must be mindful of the additional workload these projects can generate, their potential to extend beyond a single semester also creates opportunities for continuity, such as scaffolded projects that evolve and expand across multiple terms.
Another critical takeaway is the value of thinking small when planning a project and also maintaining flexibility during the semester. Despite our efforts to design bite-sized manageable tasks, some steps of our assignment sequence fell short. For instance, the final requirement of the semester prompted students to identify digitized artifacts from the CCNY digital collections, many of which documented the history of activism at the college, to create a digital exhibition that would deepen the narrative and the affordances for engagement with the narrative presented in the text. However, we simply did not have enough time to guide students in curating these materials as extensively as we had hoped, and we settled on a handful of resources organized into four collections, which were then linked to the text as multimedia annotations. Setting realistic expectations, scaling the project to fit time constraints, and adopting an adaptive project management framework during the semester—i.e., remaining open to remixing assignments or reducing the workload when needed—are key for maintaining focus on pedagogical goals without overburdening students and instructors.
Conclusion
Promoting active learning and collaboration through a digital place-based pedagogy seemed especially important upon returning to the classroom after two years of post-lockdown distance learning that affected sociality, participation, and motivation. In “Activism and the College Experience,” we relied on a place-based concentric approach informed by the principles of Open Pedagogy and implemented through DH methods. In class, students and instructors became co-learners and co-creators as we worked collaboratively to convert Let My People Know from digitally scanned images into machine-encoded text, to format it using HTML, to weave a critical framework that allowed us to understand the text trans-historically and to appreciate the hermeneutic Mendy’s experience offers to understand the present moment. We made time for students to work together in the classroom and encouraged collaboration beyond class time through group assignments, as each step of the process offered challenges and opportunities to learn both soft and hard skills. The course’s digital place-based pedagogy may be repurposed in the context of an onboarding college seminar to support incoming students’ adjustment to college life or in other contexts that call for a sustained engagement in community-building.
Testimony to the “renewable” nature of our semester-long assignment and its ability to give back to the communities encompassed by the concentric circles of our pedagogical model, Let My People Know serves as both a resource for teaching the history of activism at CCNY and a text that can be continually reinterpreted in light of contemporary events, such as the encampment built in May 2024 in solidarity with the Palestinian people: a model of peaceful protest, the students tied their current plight directly to that of the 1969 student protests on our campus, which, in turn, drew from the legacy of the Free Speech movement at CCNY in the 1930s, in which Mendy actively participated. Although the college administration called for the dismantlement of the encampment by the New York Police Department, its legacy invites reflection on the enduring role of student activism in shaping CCNY’s identity. In future courses, Let My People Know can be used to teach the history of CUNY and past forms of activism on campus, offering a lens to examine parallels between the 1930s, the 1960s, and the present. Likewise, the pamphlet’s narrative can be reinterpreted in light of events like the 2024 encampment, prompting novel readings that explore how its themes resonate in new political contexts.
