Chapter 1. Teaching @ CUNY
This chapter offers an introduction to teaching at the City University of New York. Understanding the role the institution has played within the life of the city and knowing a bit about the backgrounds of the students we teach are necessary initial steps towards creating effective learning environments. We also share a bit about the Teaching and Learning Center, what ideas and commitments drive us, and introduce the core principles that inform our work.
Chapter Outline
On CUNY as an Engine of Social Mobility
What is CUNY?
The City University of New York (CUNY) is New York City’s system of public colleges, and the third largest public university system in the United States (after the State University of New York and the Cal State system). Its origins date back to 1847, when the Free Academy, the first free public institution of higher education in the United States, was founded—this school later became City College of New York. In 1961, City College, Hunter College, Brooklyn College, Queens College, Staten Island Community College, Bronx Community College and Queensborough Community College were unified when CUNY was officially founded. Over the years additional four-year, community, and professional schools were added, and today the CUNY system is made up of 25 campuses across the five boroughs.
Figure 1. Map of CUNY campuses across New York City.
Image sourced from: CUNY Relocation Resources via Human Resources
On CUNY as an Engine of Social Mobility
A 2020 study by the Brookings Institution found that six CUNY senior colleges ranked among the top ten colleges and universities in lifting students from low-income families into the middle class. Six CUNY community colleges were also ranked in the top ten two-year institutions for the same metric. These data confirm earlier studies to validate a long-known fact: CUNY is the most consequential source of social mobility for residents of New York City.
Despite its long history and widespread impact on the city, CUNY has also been chronically underfunded. Since just 2008, per student funding has declined by 17%. That decline came on the heels of more than two decades of reductions in state funding as a share of CUNY’s budget, creating increased pressure on tuition revenues as well as persistent uncertainty about what resources will be available to colleges from year-to-year. During the COVID-19 pandemic, enrollments declined across the system, further roiling CUNY’s budgets, though enrollments have stabilized.
CUNY’s effectiveness in lifting graduates out of poverty, especially in the face of growing budget constraints, is a point of pride and source of inspiration to its students, faculty, and staff. But it also risks obscuring some of the challenges CUNY students face while pursuing their education—including food insecurity, housing insecurity, student loan debt, and having to drop out of school or take longer to complete a degree. CUNY advocates tout CUNY’s impact on social mobility as a way of celebrating students’ success and pushing back on austerity budgets, but the struggle for a CUNY that fully acknowledges the financial hardships of its students is ongoing. A narrative that elevates economic mobility as the primary goal of a college education risks diminishing the crucial role of college as a place for intellectual growth, community formation, political awakening, and other hard-to-measure factors. These tensions shape the CUNY context, and members of the CUNY community may not be in full agreement about the ultimate purpose of a college education. This is something that is important to consider as you reflect on your identity and beliefs as a CUNY teacher, and as you work with your students to create shared goals and values in class.
Who Makes Up CUNY?
With an enrollment of over 240,000 degree-seeking students, CUNY is a city in itself. CUNY’s classrooms are famously diverse, with 32 percent of students identifying as Hispanic, 26 percent as Black, and 22 percent as Asian. CUNY students speak 158 languages, and 61 percent of CUNY students are first generation college students. While 70 percent of CUNY students are under the age of twenty-five, one classroom will feature students just out of high school sitting beside students who may have spent the day caring for their grandchildren. Thirty-nine percent of CUNY undergraduates speak a native language other than English and 35 percent were born outside of the U.S. mainland. For more demographics on CUNY students, check out the Interactive CUNY Student Data Book from CUNY’s Office of Institutional Research.
Beyond the quantifiable demographic information, there are many other characteristics of CUNY students that shape our teaching. In any given CUNY class, it is likely that you will be teaching a combination of students who are enrolled either full or part-time; students who work full or part-time; students who are supporting a caretaker or who are themselves a primary caretaker; and students with visible, invisible, documented, and undocumented disabilities. Caretaker status and work status are also things that can change for students unexpectedly over the course of a semester and may require your compassion and flexibility. CUNY students reflect New York’s complexity, and they live complex lives.
CUNY students enter the classroom with a wide range of skills and a diversity of previous educational experiences and abilities. This may mean that students have different levels of confidence with reading, writing, and speaking in class, but it also means that they may vary widely in how they engage with you as the instructor, or with each other as classmates. This range of experiences and identities makes CUNY’s classrooms vibrant spaces, but it also can make it challenging to support all students equitably. Even the most seasoned and committed faculty struggle to make sure their courses are appropriately responsive to the needs of individual students while also serving the class as a whole and adhering to their responsibilities within the broader curriculum. Acknowledging and embracing these challenges and making a commitment to communication and flexibility with your students can make classes more inclusive and more effective for everyone.
Who is the TLC?
This section introduces some of the defining principles, values, and commitments that inform this handbook and, more broadly, the Teaching and Learning Center’s approach to supporting new college teachers. Our work is grounded in a commitment to making the college classroom an equitable and inclusive space. As a document written with students from more than thirty doctoral programs in mind, the principles discussed here are broad and flexible, aimed at constructing a foundation upon which effective teaching can develop across various contexts.
The TLC’s work is grounded in the histories of pedagogical innovation that have emerged in dialogue with the CUNY experience. Our work is built in explicit alignment with CUNY’s mission to educate the “children of the whole people,” and with liberatory approaches to education more generally.
The Graduate Center was founded in 1961, a decade before the era of open admissions expanded access to CUNY for Black and brown New Yorkers. Around the same time, Paulo Freire published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which first appeared in English in 1970, and which has become the core text of the critical pedagogy movement. His reflections on consciousness-raising, problem-posing, and liberatory pedagogies inform our vision of the CUNY classroom. Other scholars—several of whom taught at CUNY in the era of open admissions–built upon or expanded Freire’s insights. bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, which updates and challenges Freire’s take on critical pedagogy to incorporate lessons from feminist praxis and Black movements for liberation, helps us envision classrooms that challenge notions of authority and engage the whole student. Like hooks, feminist scholar-poet-activists Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and June Jordan also taught at CUNY. Their work helps us more fully understand the rich linguistic and cultural contexts of CUNY’s classrooms and think about how the support of our students as writers and thinkers is directly related to the liberatory potential of a college education. To read more about their teaching at CUNY, please see work compiled in Lost and Found: Light Relief by our colleagues at the Center for Humanities.
Other scholars at CUNY and beyond help us build upon the foundations from critical and feminist pedagogies above by considering the tools, methods, and technologies with which we teach. Mina Shaughnessy’s complicated legacy as director of the SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) program at City College and then founder of the field of basic writing during the era of open admissions created a framework for generations of CUNY scholars to contest the role, nature, and purpose of writing in college instruction. The work of Peter Elbow, John Bean, and other composition and rhetoric scholars helped shape Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines initiatives at CUNY, a multi-generational effort to infuse CUNY’s classrooms with an understanding of writing as a process to facilitate thinking, meaning-making, and purposeful communication. Over the past two decades composition and rhetoric scholars at CUNY and elsewhere have broadened the pedagogical foundations for how we teach writing and communication to more fully engage vernacular diversity and questions of accessibility.
For more than twenty years CUNY scholars have been thinking through how new digital technologies shape possibility in the classroom. Randall Bass’s “Visible Knowledge Project," which included several CUNY faculty, saw in new technologies the potential to open for inquiry various learning processes, which could hold great promise for pedagogical reflection and refinement. Stephen Brier’s work on a range of projects at CUNY grounded discussions of digital pedagogy in the political economy of the university, with attention to its implications for labor, cultural and political identity, and the public good. As the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of general artificial intelligence have shown, digital technologies are crucial in how our teaching and learning spaces operate and our students’ experiences and expectations. More recently scholars like Safiya Noble, Meredith Broussard, and Audrey Watters have provided powerful frameworks for critical engagement with the algorithmic and enterprise digital technology systems we adopt in our classrooms, raising crucial questions about bias, privacy, and transparency in institutional decision making. These systems and the decision to deploy them have pedagogical implications, a fact with which scholars at CUNY continue to grapple.
In the past several years, abolitionist and decarceral activism and scholarship have influenced discussions in higher education about curricular change, access and inclusion, power, and the relationship of the university to the communities it serves. Scholars, educators, and activists working in the Black feminist tradition, such as Mariame Kaba and Bettina Love, have provided language, guidance, and frameworks to help us adopt the critiques and methods from justice-oriented work to college-level teaching. They ask vital, difficult questions about the systems of knowledge and power within which our curricula and pedagogical practices are designed and deployed.
Since its founding in 2015, staff at the Teaching and Learning Center have distilled these scholarly and activist conversations through our own research and the programs we’ve designed to support GC students. We draw upon the labor and thinking of the hundreds of Graduate Center students and CUNY faculty who have flowed through the programs of the Teaching and Learning Center. We are deeply in the debt of the community we serve, and thank its members for pushing us, trusting us, and engaging with us over time.
What follows is our best effort to synthesize a set of principles from which new college teachers from dozens of disciplines can establish practices to make CUNY’s classrooms nourishing and potentially transformative spaces. Below, we introduce Context Aware, Responsive, Intentional, and Liberatory approaches for our teaching, foundational principles upon which the rest of the guidance in this handbook is built.
Foundational Principles
Context Aware
Effective teaching considers the context in which it is happening. At CUNY, faculty should enter the classroom with an understanding of the role the institution has played and continues to play in the life of the city, and within the communities CUNY serves. To understand our context, faculty should consider how students find their way into our classrooms, why they are there, and what they hope to get from the experience. We must understand that classes are located within larger curricula and systems, and also that the experience of the course also happens within an individual context specific to each person in the classroom. This awareness of context also includes our disciplines, our relationship to its methods and histories, and our sense of responsibility for facilitating our students’ engagement with that work.
Some of the contexts listed above—CUNY’s history, the demographic background of students at particular campuses, the role our course or discipline plays within our students’ broader experiences of the university—are knowable, accessible via the work of scholars, institutional research offices, or surveys we might give to our students. Other questions—our disciplines and values, the social contexts in which we do our work—are more complex, fluid, and subjective, and the answers to these questions may shift with our experiences.
No matter the starting point, considering context as part of a reflective pedagogical practice enriches the experience of teaching at CUNY and beyond.
In addition to thinking about institutional situatedness, it’s useful for teachers to think about their own positionality and to develop habits of critical self-reflection as they embark upon their teaching. Just like our students, we bring our own histories, biases, abilities, and assumptions into our work. Self-reflection helps us better account for, articulate, and challenge our own perspectives, values, decisions, and blind spots, and can help model the process for students as well.
Throughout this handbook, readers will find models for what this awareness of context looks like in practice throughout the lifecycle of a course. As a starting point, it’s important to realize that all teaching and learning experiences are embedded in complex social and cultural systems, and awareness of those systems can enhance the experience of being in a classroom for both faculty and students.
Responsive
To accommodate the contexts in which our students experience our courses, our teaching must be responsive. To begin, we cannot assume our students’ relationship to the work of our fields is similar to our own. Students have many reasons for why they may enter our classrooms, and responding to, rather than ignoring those reasons, is more likely to create an environment conducive to learning. This does not mean creating forty sets of expectations for forty students; rather, it means acknowledging that students must be agents in crafting their own experiences if the course is to be meaningful. Collaborating with our students on creating structures of meaning and co-creating knowledge—what is often referred to as “student-centered learning”—can and should be a core component of course design, regardless of discipline.
Our students are whole beings, with hopes, dreams, challenges, constraints, and histories. Inclusivity is an ethical and legal responsibility, and we must consider students’ wholeness when we are making decisions. Beyond that, though, recognition of our students’ complex lives can enrich our courses. The diversity of experiences, identities, and abilities in our classrooms is not a deficit to overcome, but an asset to explore and engage.
An individual student’s ability to thrive in a course is often contextual, and part of our work is understanding how to be responsive within the constraints of our teaching context.
Frameworks such as Universal Design for Learning can support teachers in imagining and enacting responsive and inclusive learning environments. Responsiveness, though, should be encoded into the course’s design and drawn through the whole experience of the course. The contexts and manner of diversities with which we will be working as teachers will be unknown to us until we meet our students, and those dynamics evolve in real time as the course unfolds.
Adapting an approach to pedagogy that is socially conscious helps us enact such responsiveness. This approach subverts many hegemonic educational practices by mobilizing introspection as a vehicle for greater self-awareness. It requires us to unlearn restrictive knowledge constructs, to sharpen our awareness of power relations, and to cultivate an interest in and commitment to their destabilization. Socially conscious pedagogy also requires a commitment to undoing forces of racism, sexism, ableism that constrain possibility and opportunity in our classrooms.
Intentional
Approaching our classrooms with clear intent can make teaching and learning both more effective and easier to manage. At its simplest, when you are asked why you have made a certain choice related to your course—by your students, your colleagues, or a voice inside of your head—understanding your intention will give you a firm basis to respond. In addition, fully thinking through how our decisions impact our students and the collective pursuit of our course goals can help us make difficult decisions along the way.
Most college students have been educated in a system that presents its structures as immutable, that reifies the notion of standards as, if not ordained, at least blessed by some unseen authority. Many students have been discouraged from questioning the intention behind decisions related to their schooling. Some may even expect to be punished for doing so. We may have this feeling as teachers as well, and it’s important to remember that even mundane choices we may make to go along with or enforce policies that originate outside our classrooms are choices. As teachers, we can express intent by being transparent with our students about our decisions and inviting them to think with us about the implications of the choices we make. We can also and must take active steps to ensure that students with disabilities are fully included in the experience of the course from the moment we begin our planning.
College instructors often have more freedom and flexibility than our colleagues in primary and secondary schools, and we can maximize the impact of this freedom by being clear with students about why we’re doing what we’re doing. Intentionality helps us answer the following questions: What role do grades and grading play within my course? How do I choose which readings and activities to include, and which to leave out? How do I structure classroom discussions, or scaffold assignments or skill-building exercises over time? How do I relay or determine what rules and expectations govern our time together? How do my policies—and my interpretation of the institution’s policies—produce my students’ experience of the class, the discipline, and college itself?
Your intentionality and transparency signals to students that you respect them, that you value their engagement in the course, and that you seek to empower them as learners by inviting them to reflect upon and respond to how the course comes together.
A clear sense of one’s goals is crucial to establishing intent. This strategy is true at the macro level—when you’re proposing, planning, or refining the course—and extends down to the level of brief interactions with students in office hours, responses to their questions in class, and advocacy for their access to learning experiences. It is also true of your students, who should be invited to establish their own goals and intent within the context of the work you do together in the class.
Liberatory
Ultimately, we must ask ourselves, why do we teach? There are many answers to this question. Some are pragmatic—we need money, or our fellowship requires us to do so. But these are starting points, and ultimately do not offer enough to sustain meaningful careers in the classroom. These answers also treat the experiences and goals of our students as secondary to our own trajectories.
As a new or inexperienced college teacher, it’s easy to assume that your teaching is about you, your place in your field, and your capacity as a scholar and a communicator. Your experience and feelings are certainly important and require attention. Teaching, however, should ultimately center the experiences of students who have placed their trust, time, and resources in the hands of an institution that has promised to transform their lives. That is to say: without learning, there is no teaching.
What, then, is our responsibility within that compact?
As a standard for our decision making, asking if our choices are making our students more or less free can offer profound guidance in our development as teachers.
Do our class policies ensure that students have every opportunity to engage with course material and with their classmates? Are our assessment and evaluation strategies designed to help students grow towards deeper understanding and capacity within our disciplines based on their own goals? Do we relay to our students through our language, tone, availability, and presence that we’re invested in their growth?
This standard extends to our choices about our curriculum and pedagogy as well. Do the materials and voices we select help our students see themselves, their lives, and their communities in relation to our fields? Are we structuring our class sessions in ways that invite students to build knowledge in dialogue with us and each other rather than to simply absorb information that we deliver? Are our assignments and activities built with our students’ goals and interests in mind?
Liberation is not a binary, a switch that can be flipped within one class. Rather, it is a process of assembling, integrating, and building knowledge. Our courses can help students do this, or they can impede students. Ultimately, at the Teaching and Learning Center we believe a college education has the potential to help students become freer in their thinking, their dreaming, their engagement, and in their conception of their place in the world.
Liberatory practices build upon the principles laid out above, and require context-aware, responsive, and intentional teaching. These principles resonate through the practical guidance that follows throughout this handbook and, we hope, will help readers strive towards rewarding, substantive, effective experiences in CUNY’s classrooms and beyond.