PROJECT PROFILES

New York Stories

The New York City area VKP campuses have created a new level of activity in the project: a monthly regional VKP meeting. Since February, VKP participants from the Borough of Manhattan Community College, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and the LaGuardia Community College have been gathering together to expand the conversations they have been having locally. These regional meetings combine elements from local study group meetings, affinity group communications, and local dialogues.

Given that participants from VKP’s New York schools teach at junior college, senior college, and graduate center programs, their institutions differ in many respects. The VKP New York City regional meetings expose faculty to the different stages of learning that occur over the careers of their students. Faculty from the senior colleges find it useful to hear about the learning processes of students at the community college level, as many of these students will go on to become their students. There are a number of similarities among the campuses, as well as common areas of inquiry among the VKP participants, which make this type of cross-campus discussion extremely useful.

Student Populations

Addressing cultural differences in students’ expectations for the learning process is one area of concern for many in the New York group. In his “Reading the Biography” course, Arthur Lau (LaGuardia) is exploring how reading and analysis of texts are impacted by constructive assignments. He introduces autobiographical texts to demonstrate techniques such as creative reconstruction of dialogue and sophisticated narration. Lau’s assignments aim to enhance the students’ development of their own senses of self through relating to the readings and writing about their own experiences. Lau uses his Blackboard site to provide students with links to multimedia materials and web sites that demonstrate analysis of the texts and enhance empathy for their subjects. Yet Lau recognizes that many of his students have difficulty relating to the readings or publicly sharing their personal experiences.

In Suzanne Schick’s (BMCC) Media and Society course, inexperience with technology is less a problem for many of her students than a discomfort with researching unfamiliar material. “I thought my students would take to it like fish to water but that was not necessarily the case. And it doesn’t have to do with their comfort level with technology. It has to do with the fact that they really don’t have much information about the media.” Schick finds that many of her students are not confident that they know enough about the United States to trust what they discover in an inquiry-based method. For other students, Schick has discovered that they resist an inquiry-based method because it is more work and time-consuming. This has led Schick to examine if she should commit her class time to all one method or another, instead of a combination of lecture and student-led activities. “I spend a lot of time teaching them how to learn in an inquiry-based environment. Some students are used to an even more authoritarian school system…. I have no agenda and that bothers them a lot.”

Learning Goals

David Jaffee (GC/CUNY) mostly encountered receptivity to the student-led discussion structure of his History of New York City course. Yet he discovered it was difficult for students to engage in sophisticated, contextualization of the materials he uses in class, such as Frank Capra’s film “Mr. Deeds goes to Town,” Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie, and Hudson River School landscape paintings. For his project he is examining how using a combination of visual and historical materials impacts the students’ processes of learning to make historical analyses. Along with this question, Jaffee is comparing what his students bring at the beginning of the course to the task of “reading” historical texts, fiction, photographs, and paintings with what they are integrating throughout the course. During class discussions, Jaffee recognized that many of his students possess sophisticated visual analysis skills and are adept at catching details of composition or pose. However, students do not make the kinds of linkages on their own which contextualize the various materials to the course themes. Jaffee acknowledged how difficult it is for all levels of students to integrate such diverse materials historically. “I’m thinking more and more that there needs to be explicit structure built around those particular visual items that they look at,” Jaffee said.

Jaffee’s colleague at the CUNY Graduate Center, Paula Berggren, is also working to help students better understand how to make contextualized analyses. Berggren teaches Arts in New York City to freshmen in the CUNY Honors College. For her VKP project, Berggren is asking if there is some kind of synergy created when she combines a seminar with online discussions and live events, and if that means students learn better and more because of the combination. (For more on Berggren’s project, see the September Project Profile).

Pedagogical Techniques

Like Berggren, Sharona Levy (BMCC) is helping new students recognize their abilities and fine-tune skills necessary for college-level work. Levy’s students, however, are required to take her course after failing an entrance exam in reading. While aiming to prepare her students for college-level reading and writing, Levy must also work towards the institutional goal of getting students to pass a standardized, timed reading test. “At this stage I’m really just looking for evidence of deeper reading, not a deeper understanding.” Students read short historical texts and learn how to engage with the text by breaking them down. In order to do this, Levy has begun to look closely at what is happening when her students read. After exploring various ways to discover the intermediate processes that take place when a student reads, Levy saw a demonstration of the Comment feature in Microsoft Word and decided to try it in her class. Levy’s students use pink to highlight any vocabulary which is problematic for them; yellow is used for anything that excites them. This allows students to identify areas of difficulty and interest. Levy says, “I can tell where the problems are.” Because the most advanced to the least advanced students are comfortable with the Comment feature, Levy feels the technology became transparent. “The commenting mirrored the students’ thinking process when they might not have stopped to make a comment if they had been simply reading and taking notes,” says Levy. For her VKP project, Levy is considering how this active kind of reading helps her students become better readers.

Rafael Corbalan’s (BMCC) 200-level Spanish course incorporates many types of technology, such as satellite videoconferences with students in Puerto Rico and exercises delivered via Powerpoint. Corbalan also has students work in groups, check each others’ work, then present their compositions as a team to the whole class. Since becoming a Faculty Fellow for BMCC’s Title III program (a grant from the U.S. Dept. of Education to integrate educational technology into BMCC classrooms), Corbalan has spent a lot of time focusing on which techniques support specific goals in his course. His VKP project is a natural extension of that work. As a result of the feedback he received from his VKP colleagues, Corbalan has created a student survey to begin to assess what he and his students are doing in the classroom. Corbalan is hoping that students in his class take responsibility for their learning while maintaining a comfortable relationship with him as someone supporting their learning.

Joe Ugoretz (BMCC) is exploring similar issues related to the social dynamic in a class; it just happens that his “classroom” is completely online. He is focusing his VKP project on questions related to teaching and learning in his distance-learning Science Fiction Literature course. Ugoretz hopes to promote critical thinking about literary, social, and cultural problems. Students use Blackboard to discuss themes found in the works of Science Fiction they are studying. His VKP project examines how 100% online and asynchronous discussion can help broaden the scope of the course subject matter and promote an independent, critical approach. Analyzing the quality of discussions, Ugoretz wants to determine how much critical and exploratory thinking takes place. He says his early findings show students tend to look at things deeper and with a wider ranging view. And despite the virtual nature of the course, Ugoretz believes it has fostered more collaborative work and an inter-reliance among the students for testing their ideas. “The online environment seems to promote that in a way I didn’t really expect,” he says.

September 11th

Many VKP participants shared a desire to deal with the events of September 11th and the particularities of teaching in New York in a meaningful way. Gail Green-Anderson (LaGuardia) decided to refine her VKP project to examine teaching and learning in the wake of September 11th. Green-Anderson now assigns readings that demonstrate the ways different kinds of violence have similar impacts on individuals. And the online class discussion board is a very important part of the course. Without dealing directly with the violence of September 11th, Green-Anderson hopes students will use a powerful sense of connection as a basis for their writing. (For more on Green-Anderson’s project, see the September Project Profile.

As she determines how to look at these factors and their impact on the processes involved in learning to write, Green Anderson knows she will get help from the local LaGuardia, the New York regional, and the national VKP groups. “There is something about talking to people on other campuses which is very potent,” she says. VKP provides teachers that rare opportunity to actually talk about what is happening in the classroom. As David Jaffee notes, “It’s nice to have these two communities, individual local campuses and the regional grouping, to push that along.”

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November 2002

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