Writing the World One Student at a Time
A project by four Andrew W. Mellon Transformative Learning in the Humanities CUNY Faculty Fellows
Bringing Freire Closer to Home:
“Reading the word and learning how to write the word so one can later read it are preceded by learning how to write the world, that is having the experience of changing the world and touching the world” (Freire & Macedo, 2005, p. 12).
The year was 1947. The place? Northeastern Brazil. A young Paulo Freire faced a seemingly impossible task.
He needed to teach illiterate peasant workers how to read.
To assist in this tremendously complicated process, Freire tried to empower these people beyond simply acquiring the life-changing ability to read. In addition, he wanted his students to push back against the oppressive structures that contributed to their difficult lives.
Freire was incredibly successful. By the dawn of the 1960s, he had inspired a movement to eradicate illiteracy across Brazil.
Luckily, Freire’s efforts did not only help students across his native Brazil. They have also positively impacted a much broader array of learners across the world, including those we have been so incredibly fortunate to work with here through CUNY and the Mellon Foundation’s Transformative Learning in the Humanities (TLH).
Transforming Daily Classroom Practices:
Today’s late capitalist world forces teachers and students to be incredibly busy. This can diminish our important educational work, making it less impactful than it could be otherwise. Education can become narrow, desiccated, even completely detached from the broader world we live within when we have limited time to think more deeply about our practice.
In contrast, imaginative scholars like Freire & Macedo (2005) broaden our view of the classroom. They push us to make it more reflective, generative, and impactful. Freire & Macedo invite us to expand the ambition of what we do in the classroom to consider the world around us. This includes whether we live in Brazil or closer to home here at CUNY in New York City.
Inspired by Freire, Macedo, and the other educators we have been so fortunate to encounter within TLH, we focused our student work around the idea of writing the world. More specifically, how could we create learning opportunities that not only improve the smaller circumscribed world of our learners’ CUNY classrooms, but also the broader world that their home communities inhabit?
From this deceptively complex question, we have curated student work around this idea of writing the world; the ways that their classroom efforts have the potential to write, change, and touch the world as it connects to the subject matter we engage with together in our classes.
Folding in Many Learning Opportunities through Manifold:
Our small and dedicated cohort of TLH scholars decided to share our Freire-inspired student work on Manifold. It is a fantastic platform to promote incredible textual, visual, and aural work as well as integrate written reflections to contextualize the whole collection.
In terms of specific subject matter, our Manifold project includes the following chapters:
Shawna Brandle – Choosing How to Write the World: Choose Your Own Adventure Assignments with different varieties of public facing outputs. This chapter explores several assignment options students can elect to do – from blogging on the CUNY Academic Commons or their own website, to teaching their own classes, translating course materials, and more. Privacy, safety, intellectual property, and licensing are discussed, so anyone considering adapting any of these assignments will have the knowledge needed to address these essential ethical questions in their own class. Examples of student work are included, along with students’ reflections on the assignments.
Kate Culkin – Writing the World Through Memorials: A project in which students develop projects that memorialize and teach the public about a person or group they identify as critical to understanding the history of the United States. This assignment is part of a semester-long investigation of the idea that history is an interpretation, not repetition, of facts and the power dynamics at play in those interpretations.
Dino Sossi – Institutional Advocacy: Student work suggests ways for readers to petition the government on behalf of critically important social movements as well as improve corporate practices to benefit their workforces and the world at large.
Yan Yang – Art from My Perspective: Students select and research a work of art from their own culture and introduce them in a short, informative explanation in the style of Smarthistory, the leading online art history website (the work students choose is not represented on Smarthistory). Selected student writings will serve as sources of knowledge and example projects for future Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) art history students.
Writing CUNY and Writing the World:
Our incredibly talented CUNY students constantly strive to produce thoughtful work despite highly demanding personal, professional, and academic lives. Through promising online platforms like Manifold that amplify their vital voices, not only can we celebrate student genius, but also inspire our learners’ CUNY community and their home communities to write the world in their own fashion. Empowerment through the power of words. We hope Freire would be proud.
Please continue to revisit our Manifold site as students submit amazing new work.