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.

PDC08: Narrative Inquiry in Education Research

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.

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.