When faculty commit to open teaching practices and using open resources, they are instrumental to increasing student access to knowledge and economic equity. While embracing openness can be transformative to teaching, the process is not immune to systemic issues of organizational (in)equity. CUNY has a strong record of OER work, often positioned as advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the academy. In this presentation, a pair of OER practitioners / library faculty will explore how they address labor stratification and grapple with inequitable professional designations in designing faculty development programs. Utilizing an ethic of care in teaching as a loose framework, presenters will share encounters with structural impasses, how power dynamics and teacher identity figure into their work, and actions they have taken to challenge organizational inequity. Questions to be explored include how to offer professional development opportunities that don’t exclude faculty in stratified labor designations (adjunct, tenure-track, etc.).

Begun in 2017 and permanently located at https://nesri.commons.gc.cuny.edu/,the Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI) is an ongoing digital public history initiative that currently indexes over 64,000 original records of slavery from the 1500s through the 1860s in eight northeastern states from New Jersey to Maine. NESRI provides free reports on slavery records to thousands of towns, cities and counties. The reports instantly deliver comprehensive documentation of slavery records for each locality. This project is partially supported by an American Council of Learned Societies Digital Justice Grant, funding searches for and indexing of additional records of enslavement. It is also supported by CUNY’s Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative. (BRESI) The project engages students in original historical research to enhance and expand documentation of slavery, and to diversify the historical record by reconstituting records of enslaved persons as individuals.

This workshop addresses the needs of the homeless and housing insecure among CUNY students. Whispers of an unidentified homeless population among college students has been increasing and will continue to grow as inflation hinders students’ ability to earn a sustainable wage without a safety net. Affordable housing in NY is scarce, making CUNY students particularly vulnerable. This problem is often swept under the rug or deemed unsolvable, exacerbated by undocumented cases due to feelings of shame and embarrassment which leads students to conceal their plight. This highly interactive workshop attempts to identify potential solutions as well as develop a pilot proposal in order to actively address this issue. The sharing economy was designed to match underutilized resources with individuals in need of them. This workshop takes lessons from the sharing economy to create a practical framework to take action as a first step in addressing this problem.

This session will explore moving from the traditional headspace of academia to the heart-space, while learning about DEI Fridays at Baruch College (organized by the Marxe School DEI Committee and funded by BRESI). The program’s objectives are to deepen our understanding of equity and justice; to build community around our shared humanity; and to learn practical strategies to transform our institution by centering the voices and experiences of traditionally marginalized groups. In this session, we will use contemplative practices (meditation, deep listening, and journaling), active learning, and anti-racist principles to embody education as the practice of freedom, hope, and love (bell hooks, 1994, 2003). Participants will learn how to organize a session grounded in the heart-space by experiencing one. Participants will reflect on their own identities (mirrors), learn about the experiences of those with different identities than their own (windows), and bridge differences by engaging in one-on-on connection (doors).

Some humor, while making us laugh, contains shadows of hostility toward those who cause strife – the racists, the bigots, the unaware and uneducated. Although humor can perpetuate and preserve stereotypes, it can also redress a wide variety of prejudices and preconceptions. Humor may not have been a powerful enough weapon to overthrow despotic regimes such as, for example, the US during slavery, Nazi Germany, or the former Soviet Union, but it did provide hope to the oppressed. Humor can educate the educable, counter stereotypes and, if all else fails, possibly get even. Humor provides marginalized groups with psychological strength, and enables them to rise above despair and hopelessness. Jewish humor is used here as a specific example of how humor has been used over hundreds of years to help survive oppression and teach the history of a people.

Non-marginalized faculty within higher education have long benefited from informal knowledge networks and mentorships that are often inaccessible to marginalized faculty. Without such networking and mentoring opportunities, marginalized faculty often can not understand the expectations of tenure and promotion committees, advance their careers, or band together to fight against injustices. Fortunately, there is a growing network of marginalized academics who are able to create new networks and mentorship programs to support marginalized junior faculty. In this presentation, four marginalized CUNY academics (including two junior academics) speak on the critical impact that accessing knowledge and mentors has had on their career and on their ability to overcome obstacles related to being first-generation academics, revise cultural barriers towards asking and accepting help, balance parenthood with academia, and garner senior faculty supporters. Finally, they share insider secrets on how to attain tenure and promotion as a marginalized junior faculty member.

In this panel, Drs. RaShelle Peck and Jayashree Kamblé discuss ways to center Black and POC experiences in the classroom through the lens of wonder and positive emotions.

For Dr. Peck, one of our answers to Black precarity should be a commitment to abolitionist teaching that both upends power structures that disenfranchise students and grounds the classroom in the radical search for beauty, as such approaches create spaces of nurture that attend to Black suffering. When we intentionally build abolitionist classrooms that include notions of wonder, students can experience joy, freedom, and curiosity. Her presentation will cover how she incorporates wonder in the classroom through pedagogy, taking up Sylvia Wynter’s inquiry, but what does wonder do, to consider how classrooms can be abolitionist spaces. In assignments, she builds concepts of wonder into how students examine Black politics, Africana histories, and decolonizing philosophies. For example, she asks students to complete a project that centers imagination, creativity, and academic rigor, which accomplishes three things: pushes students to examine course readings thoroughly and comprehensively; has them produce reflections on readings that incorporate artistic elements; and has them envision themselves in conversation with the authors that students read and as a part of the historical events that are covered. Ultimately, she intends for such assignments to tap into the imaginative impulses that should be central to learning.

For Dr. Kamblé, while almost 90% of the students at LaGuardia Community College identify as BIPOC, they do not see their communities’ optimistic stories and histories in the curriculum. But teaching romance novels like Office Hours (2020) in the college’s English First Year Seminar has revealed that students perk up when they read about people falling in love—people they identify with and whose authors resemble them. With the support of a CUNY Black, Race, and Indigenous Studies Initiatives (BRESI) grant, she aims to infuse literature and writing courses with her research on the forgotten work(s) of BIPOC writers and editors in mass-market romance publishing. The classes can be further enlivened when she introduces LaGuardia students to obscured BIPOC contributions to popular American literary culture. She plans to design lessons and assignments that model how to counter such erasure. Sandra Kitt’s Color of Love (1995), for instance, pairs a Black heroine with a white NYPD officer; by reading it closely, students can examine themes of inter-racial love, policing, feminism, and New York in the 1980s, and also research Kitt’s road to publishing success. The goal is to keep LaGuardia’s English major and its Liberal Arts as well as Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies offerings in step with our present moment, and prepare students for higher-level thinking on race and romance, whether in a Bachelor’s degree program after transfer or outside the academic classroom.

The Narrative Medicine Track of Distinction at CSOM centers principles of healing through interconnected creative and academic arts as essential to student learning. This pedagogical framework lives in the classroom, in the development of educational programming, and in the work environment that is informed and shaped by the diverse experiences and knowledge of our faculty and board of advisors. Narrative Medicine offers our learning community strategies and practices including: self-reflection through close reading and writing, and attentiveness to the lived experiences of others, building the capacity of our students, educators, and staff to express empathy and solidarity towards one another. It assists CSOM in creating responsive and inclusive spaces to meet the diverse needs of our community, reimagining the arts as integral to medical education. This panel will explore how our team structures student engagement, educational experiences, and administrative meetings from a holistic, self-care focused, and trauma-informed point of view.

This panel discussion will discuss where we are today in meeting the diverse needs of LGBTQ students at CUNY. Enrolling almost a quarter of a million students per year, the University likely represents the largest population of LGBTQ+-identified college students in the NYC metropolitan area. Yet the needs of transgender and gender non-conforming individuals within the CUNY system (students, faculty, and staff) have historically been critically underserved. Egregious violations of the Gender Identity/Gender Expression law (established by the New York City Commission on Human Rights) have been documented over the past five years. Following widespread cross-campus advocacy through the University LGBTQ Council and Wellness Centers, there are now significant improvements. Panelists will discuss the current status of preferred names and gender identification at CUNY, access to gender neutral bathrooms, mental health support, student engagement within and outside of the classroom, trainings designed for faculty and staff, and offer a useful roadmap forward for the larger CUNY community

Organized by Co-PIs of the Campus Climate BRESI grant Addressing Racism on Campus with Restorative Practices, this panel presents anti-racist projects grounded in restorative justice at Lehman College. We highlight our focus on actionable activities. Each presentation shows how engaged dialogues take place on our campus, and how they aim to call out white supremacist structures and enact strategies to counter them on campus. As a group, we illustrate how to engage the campus community on anti-racist and restorative justice actions, with an overview of the work being done at Lehman College during challenging times.

Professor Benton authored the CUNY University Faculty Senate study on the “faculty gap” which is available online: https://ufsbac.commons.gc.cuny.edu/. The study found that, between 2003 and 2019 in senior colleges, SUNY’s faculty positions grew almost twice as fast as enrollment, while CUNY’s enrollments grew three times faster than CUNY’s faculty positions. As a result, in 2019 the SUNY senior college ratio of faculty per thousand full-time equivalent students was 44% higher than CUNY’s ratio. The study also found that in NY state’s publicly funded (SUNY and CUNY) senior colleges in 2019, white students had substantially greater opportunities for full-time faculty instruction, compared to Black and Hispanic students. Professor Benton will provide updated statistics and explore how $53 million in FY 2022 investments in SUNY and CUNY faculty positions could affect these findings. Are we narrowing the “faculty gap” and are we improving minority student opportunities for access to full-time faculty instruction.

The facilitation of inclusion and equity constitutes a perennial social justice mission, a point underscored for students with expression and verbal differences, whether documented or differences which do not fit DSM categories. These students may not express inclusion needs or may express indirectly without clarity. Students need not self-advocate when needs are apparent, but may face self-advocacy challenges when needs are not obvious. Who are these students with expression differences, what are some common issues, and how can faculty and staff assist with the facilitation of inclusion and equity needs? This interactive presentation will address these questions and discuss developing awareness of this growing student subset to remain mindful of their inclusion needs, albeit unexpressed or indirectly indicated, and will focus on engagement and advocacy strategies to move towards improved inclusion and equity. Scenarios will be presented for attendee input of best practices with this population.

In this interactive workshop, brief presentations will cover an array of transformative learning methods that structure equity into a classroom, build community, and interrogate the racist and ableist norms that influence teaching and learning. These methods work at any level, at any institution, and in any discipline, and are based on decades of research in the learning sciences showing the efficacy of active learning. As part of each presentation, the audience will engage in a short activity to put these empirically driven, classroom-tested active learning techniques into practice.

Refugees are, by definition, little more than people in crisis. Driven from their homes to escape war, persecution, disaster, or some other painful ailment, refugees flee to the United States in search of a better life for themselves and their children. In 2022, 1,775 refugees were resettled in New York State (Monroe, 2022). The refugees largely came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Afghanistan, Burma, and Ukraine, as well as 57 other countries in crisis (Monroe, 2022). Of these refugees, approximately 40% tend to be under the age of 18 and thus require admission into the education system (Baugh, 2022). Therefore, the increasing need for social justice is a direct response to the continuous growth in the number of refugees from diverse countries. To support teachers, administrators, students in training, and counselors in developing a more thorough understanding of the three levels of advocacy for social justice, this workshop will provide knowledge about the refugee crisis and the necessary tools to develop advocacy on behalf of this group.

Often when designing inclusive pedagogies, we keep a diverse group of students or perspectives in mind. What if we involved them in the design process of program development? This workshop uses the development of a Bachelors of Arts in Youth Studies as a case study in participatory program design. Participants will learn about how a BA in Youth Studies was developed with input from current Youth Studies Masters students, faculty, alumni, as well as CBO and city agency partners. This workshop will elucidate how a co-design processes may help move us away from illusions of inclusion or performative diversity. The facilitator will share the BA creation story and invite participants to engage in dialogue around a series of questions for collective consideration.

This presentation will provide a valuable perspective on work in higher education—that of a Black woman in leadership roles. The experiences of Black women in educational leadership differ greatly from those of White women and other women of color. Yet, research about the challenges they face, although increasing, is still minimal. It is vital that their lived experiences and voices be heard in order to dismantle the strongholds of racial microaggression, racial battle fatigue, and gendered racial microaggression in academia. The use of the term ‘women and people of color’ distorts and detracts from the specific experiences of Black women, thereby, rendering them invisible. Black women’s experiences are different from those of (White) women, women of color, or people of color, which include men. The presentation will provide an analysis of leadership strategies and effective accomplice-ship that allowed for impactful change and reflect on the challenges that can emerge when leadership shifts and priorities change, especially in DEI work. Because their experiences are so different and are often missing or ignored in scholarship, it is imperative to conduct targeted research and conversations about Black female faculty and administrators to ascertain how their experiences shape their ability to thrive – or not.  

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) guidelines, created by CAST, propose ways to address diversity and disabilities in higher education classrooms by intentionally adjusting the curriculum to suit the students’ learning needs. UDL checkpoints encourage creating intentional designs that instill confidence, provide assignment transparency, and create a sense of belonging.

The “We Belong: Creating a Culture of Inclusivity at BMCC” panel will examine the evolution of the Borough of Manhattan Community College’s (BMCC) Race, Equity, and Inclusion (REI) Steering Committee. REI serves as the “Conscience of the College” and creates a space and culture of true belonging. The Committee leads and supports college-wide efforts to develop strategic and sustainable initiatives to expand inclusive pedagogies; establish vehicles to share information, exchange ideas, and generate knowledge; and identify and challenge informal and formal policies/practices that may pose obstacles to institutional practices. Panelists will assess committee structure and goals; consider strategies to garner investment from the College community and leadership; analyze challenges associated with leading college-wide efforts to strengthen equity, diversity, inclusion, and a sense of belonging; and present community colleges’ unique challenges in building a space to carry out this critical work to establish metrics and achieve meaningful outcomes.