Category Archives: Working Group

Narrating America in the Contemporary Community College

Center For the Humanities Events, Working Group,

 

A Public Storytelling Research Forum

(Cross Posted on the Center for the Humanities)

Narrating America in the Contemporary Community College will be a one-day workshop with key participants defining the public role of community college as an inclusive democratic space. Educators and researchers at the Graduate Center, CUNY are organizing this forum for increased public engagement and collaborative research in higher education.

At the forum, research with students’ stories will be the basis for collaborative working groups of students, faculty, administrators, community leaders, and public officials interpreting those stories to improve the community college mission and practice. The ultimate goal of the day is to use this public forum to take students’ voices seriously as the basis for collaborative reflection and action. What is at stake is public reflection on a transforming site of American participation.

Campus Community Organizers

Svetlana Jović is a writing fellow for the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC) program at Bronx Community College. She received her undergraduate and master’s degree at University of Belgrade, Serbia, and is currently a doctoral candidate in developmental psychology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Svetlana is a visiting lecturer at the Social Sciences and Cultural Studies Department at Pratt Institute, New York, where she teaches courses in psychology.

Tara Bahl is a substitute instructor of urban studies and social sciences at Guttman Community College. She holds a PhD from CUNY Graduate Center in the Urban Education program, with a concentration in education policy. Her dissertation explored the often disconnect between how education policy (college & career readiness) is made, and how high school students experience it in their everyday lives. She is interested in exploring viable strategies that reimagine the college experiences of first-generation-to-college students as student-centered and meaningful—what this looks like in policy, practice, and the lives of students.

Trikartikaningsih (Kiki) Byas is Associate Professor of English at Queensborough Community College of CUNY where she teaches an advanced writing course on the immigrant experience in addition to the regular College Composition classes.  Her research interests include Collaborative Learning, Cross-cultural Communication, Technology Enhanced Learning, and Digital Storytelling.

Rachel Ihara is an Associate Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College, where she teaches literature and composition classes and helps to direct the Freshman Writing Program. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center, focusing on American novels and serial publication. Current research interests include writing pedagogy and the relationship between Freshman Composition and college-wide reading and writing practices.

Jesse W. Schwartz is an Assistant Professor at LaGuardia Community College, where he teaches courses in composition and American literature. He received his PhD in English and American Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2013, and his interests include radical American literature, periodical studies, Marxian theory, and critical race and ethnic studies.

With Presentations by:

Tanzina Ahmed
David A. Caicedo
Colette Daiute
Philip Kreniske 
Jessica Murray
NarratingAmerica-Program 

 

Narrating Change, Changing Narratives Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research – See recordings of the event here: http://www.centerforthehumanities.org/programming/collections/narrating-america

Detailed Schedule Narrating (in) Community Colleges this Friday, May 2nd!

Center For the Humanities Events, Working Group, , , ,
Fri May 2, 10:00am – 4:00pm | A Day of Discussion | @The Graduate Center
10-10:15: Coffee/welcome (Sylvia Scribner Conference Room 6304.01)
10:15 – 11:00 Community Voice Research Project – Diverse Perspectives on the Role of the Community College
11- 12: DREAMers Speak: Narratives of DREAM Act Students
Lunch 12 – 1 @ Center for Globalization and Social Change (Rm 5109)
Afternoon Sessions on C Level 198
1:00-2:00 Continuing conversation: Findings from our “Community Voice” research project  – with open discussion and activity session; discussion of the findings with data in hand and implications for practice and policy.
2:15-3:15: No Divide: A Project for Personalizing Academic Writing – campus-wide writing project
3:15-4:00 New Narratives, New Directions: Taking the Next Steps
4-5 Wine & Cheese! Reception @ Center for Place, Culture, and Politics (Rm6107)

Cosponsored by the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities, Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, Center for Globalization and Social Change and the Human Development, Psychology Training Area.

…..event description

 

Discussions led by a number of Graduate Center and Community College faculty and students (in alphabetical order):

 

Narrating (in) Community Colleges this Friday, May 2nd!

Working Group
Fri May 2, 10:00am – 4:00pm | A Day of Discussion | @The Graduate Center
Narrating (in) Community Colleges

Writing, both narrative and non-narrative, has long been a focus in community colleges. But students and faculty at community colleges have radically different experiences in their encounters with writing. For some students, writing in the community college serves as a gate-keeping process; students on vocational tracks may have many fewer opportunities for writing; still other students may be asked to focus on technical writing alone. But even seemingly “basic” forms of writing like personal narratives serve to mediate individual and societal relations in critical and creative ways. This moment provides us with an opportunity for linking narrative and other forms of writing to recent changes and developments in community colleges. For this conference, the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities is gathering scholars, teachers, students, and activists from throughout the CUNY community to reflect on these issues and engage with questions of practice and policy. Conference details coming soon.

Cosponsored by the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities, Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, Center for Globalization and Social Change and the Human Development, Psychology Training Area.

Discussions led by a number of Graduate Center and Community College faculty and students:

(in alphabetical order) Anthony Allessandrini, David Caicedo Colette Daiute, Sujatha  Fernandes, Svetlana Jovic, Phil Kreniske, Justin Rogers-Cooper, Jesse Schwartz and Renata Strashnaya.

Narrating Change At AERA “Narrative Inquiry in Education Research”

Working Group

PDC08: Narrative Inquiry in Education Research

Narrative Inquiry

Instructors:     Colette Daiute, The Graduate Center – CUNY; Philip Kreniske, The Graduate Center (CUNY)
Date:               Wednesday, April 2, 9:00 am–5:00 pm
Location:    Philadelphia Convention Center, 100 Level – 118C

Narrative inquiry in education research builds on theory and practice defining narrating as a social process.  The course format includes presentations and hands-on modules for narrative research design and narrative analysis in studies of teaching and learning sensitive to diversity, social change, and other issues.  Course participants are graduate students, early career scholars, and advanced researchers becoming familiar with narrative inquiry.  Course objectives include to present principles of narrative inquiry, to illustrate these principles in prior published research, and to practice applying the principles in new studies. Potential assignments include doing values analysis and significance analysis to examine narrative data provided by the instructors or data brought by course participants.  No equipment or prior experience with narrative analysis is required.

 

Possibility and Hegemony in Student Expression, Friday, December 6, GC@ 5:30pm

Center For the Humanities Events, Working Group, , ,

Narrating Change Seminar

Possibility and Hegemony in Student Expression

Friday, December 6th, 5:30pm

Room 6304.01, PhD Program in Psychology

repost from Center for the Humanities  

 narrating hegemony What are the privileged – hegemonic – ways of knowing and being underlying our public educational system? In contrast, what are the students’ ‘alternative’ expressive skills, often overseen or disregarded in the educational setting? How do these questions relate to the problem of perpetuating inequality in our society? Join Professors Christopher Emdin, Angela Reyes and Debangshu Roychoudhury along with Julio Marquez, and Chante Reid for a conversation about the developmental and pedagogical repercussions of inviting or dismissing students’ alternative discursive skills.

Co-sponsored by Narrating Change Seminar

 

 

Free and open to the public. All events take place at The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Ave btwn 34th & 35th. The building and the venues are fully accessible. For more information please visit http://centerforthehumanities.org/ or call 212.817.2005 or e-mail ch@gc.cuny.edu

 

 

Editorial on Roma in the Times

Center For the Humanities Events, Working Group, , , ,
excerpted from the Times:

THE OPINION PAGES | EDITORIAL

Scapegoating the Roma, Again

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD OCT. 17, 2013

The Roma, sometimes called Gypsies, have been part of the European cultural landscape for centuries. They have also suffered greatly from discrimination and prejudice, particularly in times of economic crisis, when they become scapegoats.

That is happening now. Faced with stubbornly high unemployment and strained budgets, some European Union members are finding it easier to stigmatize and expel Roma than to provide them with the education, housing and employment they seek.

In London, a Roma camp was dismantled over the summer and most of its residents sent back to Romania. In the Czech Republic, Roma children are still routinely segregated in schools. In Sweden, revelations that the police kept a secret registry of Roma families touched off a national storm.

…Continue reading the full Times editorial

and come join the conversation with the Narrating Change Seminar @The Graduate Center

Narrating Reform: Roma Educators Narrate Social Inclusion in Europe

Oct 22, 2013, 6:30pm
The Skylight Room (9100)

Tünde Kovacs-Cerovic, Jordan Naidoo, Colette Daiute

And

Discussion of the Report: “Roma Educators Narrate Reform”

@The Graduate Center,  October 23, 2:00 – 4:00

Please write to cdaiute@gc.cuny.edu for the report and the room number.

 

Károly BARI, Autobiography of a Cherub
Károly BARI, Autobiography of a Cherub

repost from The Center for the Humanities:

“Social inclusion” is a promise and issue of heated negotiation across Europe, where dramatically changing populations are the result of economic migration, displacement by war and revolution, poverty, and other exclusions. Eleven million Roma in diverse communities are living in marginalized conditions that are central to policies and politics of social inclusion. The Decade of Roma Inclusion, 2005-2015, declared by 13 countries across Eastern Europe to provide an agenda and resources has prompted an education reform (among reforms in health and housing). The Pedagogical Assistant Program in Serbia is a dynamic effort revolving around self-determination by Roma through professional participation in education.  Join us for a presentation and discussion of goals, activities, and tensions in this education reform, with examples from research highlighting perspectives of the Roma teaching assistants.

 

tinda
Tünde Kovacs-Cerovic, Professor of Educational Psychology & Education Policy at Belgrade University
Jordan Naidoo, Senior Education Advisor at UNICEF
Jordan Naidoo, Senior Education Advisor at UNICEF
Colette Daiute, Professor of Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Colette Daiute, Professor of Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cosponsored by the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities.

 

 

 

Notes from “Emerging Narratives: Illuminating Breakthrough Experiences of Community,” 9/27

Working Group

The opening meeting of the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities was designed as a way to begin our discussion of narrating community, within our larger focus on narrative and social change. It also functioned as the beginning of a community-building process for us, as the hope for the coming academic year is to move away from a focus on one-off events (as valuable as these can be) and to move towards the developing of working groups that can collaborate and support members of the seminar in developing ongoing work. We are working towards a final conference at the end of the spring where much of this ongoing work can be presented, and have also begun to discuss other possible outlets for disseminating the work of the seminar.

Concretely, we decided to form two working groups that will work on specific projects (both of these are working titles for the groups): 1) a community narrative archive team, which will work on bringing together existing CUNY reports (task force findings, student- and faculty-initiated reports, and other documents) with an eye towards questions of narrating community; and 2) a cross-CUNY writing team, which will work on developing a writing prompt focusing on analyzing notions of community that could be assigned across a spectrum of classes throughout the CUNY colleges, from two-year campuses to the GC (as part of the process of working towards the idea of more direct collaborative work to be carried out between classes across these different campuses and colleges). Separate pages for each working group have been set up on the Narrating Change blog, to provide a space for online collaboration. There was also a discussion of ideas for planning towards the conference in May, as well as other working group possibilities, including working towards identifying forms of research support for those teaching at the two-year campuses, and developing alternative pedagogical spaces for the discussion of community and social change, including the ongoing work of the Free University.

We decided to meet again on Friday, November 1 at 10am at LaGuardia Community College, English Department Conference Room (E Building, Room 103); this would be a meeting for working groups to come back together and follow up, as well as a chance to continue some of the discussions we began at the first meeting, and to bring in new participants and new ideas as well. There are also several events related to the seminar that are coming up in October: a film screening on Wednesday, October 9 at 7:00pm (Screening of When Mother Comes Homes for Christmas, followed by a conversation with filmmaker Nilita Vachani, moderated by Sujatha Fernandes), co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities, at the Graduate Center, Martin E. Segal Theater; an event on Tuesday, October 22 at 6:30pm (Narrating Reform: Roma Educators Narrate Social Inclusion in Europe, featuring Tünde Kovacs-Cerovic, Jordan Naidoo, and Colette Daiute), at the Graduate Center, The Skylight Room (Room 9100); and two panel discussions on Wednesday, October 23 at 2:00pm – 4:00pm Discussion of the Report: “Roma Educators Narrate Reform” Graduate Center, Please write to cdaiute@gc.cuny.edu for the report and the room number.

For more info, check out our blog at https://changeblog.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ or go to http://centerforthehumanities.org/seminars/narrating-change.

Tentative Schedule of Meetings and Events, Fall 2013

Working Group

Meeting 1: Friday, September 27, 10:00am
Emerging Narratives: Illuminating Breakthrough Experiences of Community
Organizer: Tony Alessandrini
Graduate Center, Room 8106

Co-Sponsored Event: Wednesday, October 9, 7:00pm
Screening of When Mother Comes Homes for Christmas, followed by conversation with filmmaker Nilita Vachani, moderated by Sujatha Fernandes
Co-sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities
Graduate Center, Martin E. Segal Theater

Event: Tuesday, October 22, 6:30pm
Narrating Reform: Roma Educators Narrate Social Inclusion in Europe
Featuring Tünde Kovacs-Cerovic, Jordan Naidoo, and Colette Daiute
Graduate Center, The Skylight Room (Room 9100)

Meeting 2: Wednesday October 23, 2:00pm – 4:00pm
Discussion of the Report: “Roma Educators Narrate Reform”
Organizer: Colette Daiute
Graduate Center, Please write to cdaiute@gc.cuny.edu for the report and the room number.

Meeting 3: Friday, November 1, 10:00am

Follow-Up on Narrating Change Working Groups: The Community Narrative Archive Team and The Cross-CUNY Writing Team
LaGuardia Community College, English Department Conference Room, E Building, Room 103

Meeting 4: Friday, December 6, 3:00pm
Possibility and Hegemony in Contemporary Writing, With and in Spite of Social Media
Organizer: Svetlana Jovic
Location TBA

For more information on the seminar, go to http://centerforthehumanities.org/seminars/narrating-change.

Emerging Narratives: Illuminating Breakthrough Experiences of Community

Center For the Humanities Events, Working Group, , , ,

Emerging Narratives: Illuminating Breakthrough Experiences of Community, A Narrating Change Seminar

Friday, September 27th, 10:00am, @The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave. Room 8106Emerging Narratives: Illuminating Breakthrough Experiences of Community, A Narrating Change Seminar

repost from Center for the Humanities:

(RSVP Information Below)

Join us for our opening meeting, on Friday, September 27, for an open discussion, and creating possible working groups that could collaborate throughout the year. We are particularly interested in discussing potential or ongoing pedagogical and research projects that focus on questions of community formation; that re-think the relationship between “the classroom” and “the community”; and/or that work to reconstitute the CUNY community. We welcome proposals and possibilities from faculty and students working and teaching across all levels of the CUNY campuses. For our first meeting, we propose to think through ways that narrative can contribute to these processes of community formation, and also to share narratives from our own experiences of creating community through our pedagogical and intellectual practices.

During the 2013-2014 academic year, the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities will present a series of meetings, discussions, and working groups to address—in writing, speaking, and publishing—questions regarding the community college as a location and agent of change. Our goal will be to foster collaborations between faculty and students from across the different CUNY campuses around these questions, as part of a larger focus on the question of narrative and community building.

While the community college will be a point of focus, we also intend to open up the larger question of what “community” means for our pedagogical and intellectual practices; what sort of an intellectual community CUNY is (or could be); and how narratives help to shape, constitute, and transform communities.

Because space is limited, please RSVP to any of the seminar co-chairs: Tony Alessandrini [tonyalessandrini@gmail.com]; Colette Daiute [CDaiute@gc.cuny.edu]; Svetlana Jovic [SJovic@gc.cuny.edu]; Phil Kreniske [pkreniske@gc.cuny.edu].

For more information on the seminar, go to http://centerforthehumanities.org/seminars/narrating-change.