Introduction

During the 2022/2023 academic year, we heard so many conversations about the difficulties our students and ourselves as well were having in the classes since pandemic. In Issue #29 of the Inquirer we posted a special section on reflections of our pandemic years and the teaching we have been doing since. But the 2022/2023 academic year felt different. No one had to learn remotely. There were plenty of classes being offered fully face-to-face. Yet many of those classes got canceled because of low enrollment. Many of us found that our discussions last year often turned toward worry about how disengaged students were and questions about how to engage them again. So we began this issue of the Inquirer asking different faculty members their perspective on the state we find ourselves in with our students and our teaching.

Hardaye (Sherie) Hansen and Michael McGee explore the social and psychological effects of the pandemic and quarantine. They give an account on early findings that, unsurprisingly, report increases in anxiety, depression, alcohol use, eating disorders, among other things. And they move deeper into the psychological effects as they examine studies that show how the effects of online learning blurred boundaries between students’ schoolwork and personal lives and how online learning led to many students’ disengagement and lagging motivation for their academic work. Some of the ways the authors suggest we can begin working through the effects of the pandemic are through activities that help to rebuild a sense of community, increased support for mental health and counseling services on campus and strengthening relationships with organizations off campus so that students have a sense of themselves in the greater community.

Echoing those ideas, we have a contribution from Kathleen Offenholley, who also looks at the difficulty so many of us have been finding in the classroom and reassures us, “They are no more ‘bad’ students than we are ‘bad’ teachers. It’s the stress we’re all breathing in every day in this ‘post’-Covid world, the stress of having been through several enormously difficult years.” Kathleen goes on to give us ideas about creating joyful and inclusive classrooms and bringing the stress levels down so that students are ready to learn the content we’ve prepared for them.

Hollis Glaser found some of these very same strategies when she adopted the Introduction to Gender Studies and Women’s Studies class from our late colleague Brianne Waychoff. Some of the ways that Brianne taught her class pushed Hollis to new levels of teaching. Among the things that Hollis reflects on as part of adopting Brianne’s class are being completely open with our platforms, our work and our students, respect for our students emotional and intellectual maturity, finding ways to use ungrading and to discourage use of ChatGPT or other AI software by asking students to apply the lessons of the class to their own personal lives. Hollis concludes, “[Brianne] created wonderful conversations with her students. She treated them as equals and loved them in the bell hooks way of love, meaning to bring your whole personhood into the classroom and to allow the students to do the same.”

Francisco Delgado’s contribution here is an example of how he brought his own identity into the classroom and how, echoing Sherie and Michael’s piece, he has used his teaching to engage students with the wider community. “Because of my family background, I have always taken great pride in how I integrate Native American and Indigenous writers into each of my classes.  Likewise, I am proud to have made my students more aware of nearby cultural organizations, such as the National Museum of the American Indian and the American Indian Community House.” His piece describes the work he’s done with the BRESI (Black, Race and Ethnic Studies Initiative) project, a group of CUNY faculty from Brooklyn College, Lehman and BMCC working to “develop Native American and Indigenous Studies curricula at CUNY, as well as to develop the intersection of Native American and Indigenous Studies and other Ethnic Studies fields.” Their work has resulted in research collaborations, new course development, events to celebrate Native American cultural history and a relationship between CUNY campuses and the American Indian Community House.

The contribution from Anika Thrower and Alex Evangelista brings our focus again on ideas for building community within our classrooms.  Their work is on the research behind how collaborative learning strategies help build engagement for students within the classroom. They define collaboration as “mutual agreement within the classroom allowing students to engage in a joined effort to master a concept or work towards solving a central problem. . . .Collaborative learning activities might assist students by providing explanations for their understanding, elaborating their descriptions, and reorganizing their knowledge, thereby improving the comprehension of concepts.” Their piece reminds us that simple things like learning our students’ names and having them learn each others’ is a way of building community in the classroom.

Chamutal (Tali) Noimann, Mateo Sancho Cardiel and Judith Anderson remind us of the ways that what we teach needs to matter to us, needs to feed into what we think is important in the larger work, and reminds us that we need to take care of our own intellectual needs if we are going to instill a love of our topic for students.

Tali Noimann’s piece is an excellent primer on another issue that keeps growing in the larger culture around us: book bans. Tali gives us a short history on the ways that book bans have condensed around literature for children, demonstrating the ways that our cultural anxieties so often happen around learning and education. In her class, “Banned Books and Censorship,” she writes, “I hope to clarify students’ values and thoughts about the role of literature in shaping their views, as well as the role of religion in the schools and issues around separation of church and state, the freedom of the press, and what limits there ought to be, if any, on the freedom to read, and who, if anyone, should be authorized to set those limits.”

Mateo Sancho Cardiel writes about how he brought his love of film into his sociology classes. Echoing the ideas in Hollis’ contribution on teaching Brianne Waychoff’s class, Mateo reminds us to respect our students’ intelligence and to introduce complex narratives for them to unpack. He remembers as an undergraduate, he felt his professors chose films that were too obvious and too simple to engage him. He wanted complexity then, and he’s found that our students also respond to the kind of complex narrative he longs for in his own work. He writes, “I decided to challenge myself and my students and, thanks to the wonderful streaming platforms that BMCC provides. . .I can proudly say that my students positively reacted to the not-so-obvious movies that I included in the syllabus.”

Judith Anderson takes us on a professionally satisfying study abroad trip to Senegal she took in January 2023 and reminds us of the ways that we need to be pushing our own limits of knowledge and understanding. She points out how studying abroad has pushed her own academic understanding, her own positionality in the larger global space, her own pedagogical and critical understanding, and how it put into perspective the workload and compromises she has had to make as a faculty member. She writes, “I often speak about how transformative it is for students [to study abroad], but I argue that it is equally as inspirational for faculty. It is crucial that we expand our own knowledge base outside of the usual borders of our research expertise and increase our cultural competency as this is an investment in our students.”

The next piece, culled from discussions among faculty in Jean Amaral’s Re-envisioning Scholarship at BMCC, reflects on the many ways these faculty imagine could be ways to evaluate our contributions to the college, the university and our fields as we apply for tenure and promotion.

Our final section for this issue tackles the quickly changing landscape of technology. Who among us hasn’t felt overwhelmed by the rapid development of artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT. Rifat Salam gives us a perspective on handling the reality of ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence (GAI) programs. The presence of GAI has had many of us feeling uneasy and anxious. Rifat reminds us that we have the skills already to handle GAI by remembering to integrate scaffolding, emphasize process over product and develop assignments that are as specific to our classes as possible.

Sharell Walker reminds us about ways the library can help us teach our students digital literacy to help them keep their identities safe online. Our library offers courses for students on how they can build awareness of their digital footprints and ways they can make sure their footprints include positive associations with their identities.

Once again, our faculty have offered powerful reflections, provocative thinking, and shared accounts of audacious doing to make up this year’s issue. We hope you feel as excited and enriched by reading these pieces as we felt putting the issue together.

We are happy to accept proposals for our next issue. Please see the call for papers in the following pages.

All best wishes,

The Editors

More From This Issue