Foreword
Teaching at CUNY has been a transformative and invigorating experience for thousands of Graduate Center (GC) students. Our goal at the Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) is to help current and future GC students succeed in this work.
Introduction to the Text
Teaching is challenging for even the most seasoned, committed instructors. Every class section presents a new mix of personalities, levels of preparedness, and needs. Every semester renews the challenge of translating our scholarship for undergraduates and making our classes accessible to all of our students. And every year evolving political and social realities impact the lives of both faculty and students, particularly those from the historically underrepresented communities that make up the majority of the undergraduate population at CUNY. As we write this text in Spring 2025, CUNY students are in a heightened state of vulnerability. As such, instructors must, now more than ever, pay close attention to the dialogue happening in their classrooms and ensure it is a space where students feel cared for, and that their success is a priority.
CUNY’s undergraduates make our classrooms unique and vibrant spaces, and their time, labor, and attention should be met by their instructors with a profound sense of duty and responsibility. Teaching at CUNY can enrich and propel both our scholarship and our career prospects, while giving us powerful ways to have a lasting impact on the people of New York City. We also learn a lot from our teaching.
To new instructors: You are not alone in meeting this challenge. The TLC is always available to support you, and there are also dozens of other spaces throughout CUNY that offer opportunities for the exploration of pedagogy (which will be noted throughout this handbook). CUNY’s campuses have generous and welcoming teaching centers, vibrant writing centers, resourceful and helpful librarians, engaged department-based networks, and committed faculty and staff who share the TLC’s belief that pedagogy is best conceived of as a collaborative pursuit.
In the pages that follow, we offer practical guidance for Graduate Center students from all disciplines who are just beginning to conceive of themselves as college teachers. We will walk you through course and syllabus preparation, assignment design and assessment, and offer suggestions for navigating CUNY. We will also prompt readers to consider common issues new teachers face, and to explore how to deal proactively with challenges that may arise.
What’s New in the Sixth Edition
This handbook is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather to provide a snapshot of some of our thinking and work at TLC, and a distillation of the conversations we’ve had over time. A reflective, critical, collaborative pedagogy oriented toward care and flexibility is crucial. In this edition, we have streamlined and shortened the text, balanced and sharpened the chapters, integrated more practical guidance into the body of the Handbook, and been more attentive to questions of accessibility for students with disabilities throughout. We have also generated a series of reflective worksheets and checklists added as resources throughout which will help readers actively engage with the guidance that we offer. We have removed much of language in earlier editions that responded to the COVID-19 Pandemic, and tried our best to reflect the pedagogical conversations we encounter across CUNY. These edits were intended not only to make the text more readable, but to set the Handbook up for future revision. We look forward to that work.
In solidarity and community,
The Staff of the Teaching and Learning Center, CUNY Graduate Center
May 2025