The following projects document assignments and classroom activities designed during the pandemic. These are either assignments that have been created or altered to adjust for the pandemic’s impact, or to capture the impact of the pandemic on students. Please follow the links below to find out more about each participant and their projects. The list is organized alphabetically.

LENNAY M. CHAPMAN | PH.D. PROGRAM IN MARKETING (BARUCH/GC CUNY) | CONTACT: LENNAY.CHAPMAN@BARUCH.CUNY.EDU | EXPLORE LENNAY’S PROJECT

Bio: Lennay Chapman holds an MBA from Baruch College and currently is a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate in Marketing at Baruch College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She teaches Marketing Foundations, which is a course that introduces students across all business majors to fundamental marketing concepts. Lennay’s academic research examines the impact of technology on consumer behavior, and has been presented at the Society for Consumer Psychology (SCP) conference. Before transitioning to academia, Lennay spent nearly a decade working in merchandise planning and allocation for companies including Ann Taylor, LOFT, and Ross Stores; she also wrote articles for The Motley Fool.

Project description: While COVID-19 has created countless challenges for educators, it also has contributed learnings and opportunities through novel teaching methods. In this reflection, I identify one unexpected opportunity associated with Zoom-mediated teaching: increased student engagement through the chat feature. The chat feature enables students to participate in an unobtrusive way, and can facilitate frequent, enthusiastic participation (when combined with questions and calls for examples). This reflection is designed for other educators who may not be using the chat feature to increase engagement. I also am sharing my experience to capture one way in which COVID-19 has impacted higher education.

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MAXINE KRENZEL | PH.D. PROGRAM IN ENGLISH | EXPLORE MAXINE’S PROJECT

Bio: Maxine is a sixth year Ph.D. Candidate in English with a focus in composition-rhetoric. My research interests are in the history and pedagogy of teacher education, literacy studies, writing pedagogy, autobiography theory, and the history of composition studies as a discipline. I currently teach the First Year Writing Sequence at Baruch College and am a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at Bronx Community College where I am developing writing intensive training curricula for new teachers across disciplines.

Project description: I am sharing an archival research assignment I developed last spring that asks students to research an artifact through the CUNY Digital History Archive. In this assignment, students consider the importance of a chosen artifact in relation to CUNY’s history of student activism and to their experience as CUNY students today. I offer this as a resource for any instructor interested in teaching archival research skills while we don’t have physical access to CUNY’s libraries. I found that asking students to conceive of historiography as a form of storytelling opens up pertinent questions regarding how to locate oneself in a still unfolding history and how student voices are essential to telling and documenting the story of the present.

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SOOHYUN (ASHLEY) LEE | PH.D. PROGRAM INDUSTRIAL-ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY (BARUCH/GC CUNY) | CONTACT: SOOHYUN.ASHLEY@GMAIL.COM | EXPLORE SOOHYUN’S PROJECT

Bio: Soohyn (she/her) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Baruch College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. I research workplace emotions and motivations. I am teaching Social Psychology (PSY3056) and Advanced Organizational Psychology (PSY4181) at Baruch College, and teaching Industrial-Organizational Psychology (PSY240) at Lehman College.

Project description: During the pandemic, many students struggle with being on track with assignments and exams. I have created an “online checklist” that students can easily check upcoming assignments and important deadlines and be more organized in their learning. Moreover, I have shared class discussion questions that students reflect on the current pandemic situation through psychology perspectives (topics: virtual teams, leadership in crisis, diversity & inclusion). Finally, I have included an essay assignment that students apply course contents to the pandemic situation. Through this assignment, students think deeply about how organizations can help their employees stay engaged while working from home.

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SARAH MADY | PH.D. PROGRAM IN ANTHROPOLOGY | CONTACT: SMADY@GRADCENTER.CUNY.EDU | EXPLORE SARAH’S PROJECT

Bio: I teach Ancient Peoples and Cultures (ANT212) at Lehman College, Department of Anthropology. I am also a Ph.D. Candidate in Archaeology at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and an art teacher at Hudson Montessori School. During the March lockdown, many schools did not offer online art classes for children. At first, I wanted to help my students who are parents by offering their children free art classes, but then I realized they were enjoying them just as much. The objective was for the children to keep creating, and for the parents to be inspired by new ideas and projects for their little ones.

Project description: For this collection, I chose the Zentangles over a hand tracing. This project could be used as a resource for others to use in their classrooms. It could be scheduled once a month at the end of class, for those interested. Since it requires minimal drawing skills, it is engaging for all levels and ages. Many of us do not have the means to pay for art classes, which don’t need to teach us how to draw, but at least offer simple yet therapeutic projects. These meetings allowed us to meet informally and have some much-needed fun at the time.

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ASHLEY MARINACCIO | PH.D. PROGRAM IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE | CONTACT: ASHLEYMARINACCIO@GMAIL.COM | EXPLORE ASHLEY’S PROJECT

Bio: Ashley Marinaccio (she/her) is a New York-based documentarian dedicated to shedding light on the socio-political issues that define our times. Currently, she is a Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY where she researches documentary theatre and theatre performance in war zones. She has taught Theatre and Social Justice, Theatre of the Oppressed, Ensemble Devised Theatre, and various other classes that explore the role of theatre within social justice and political movements. You can learn more about her work at ashley-marinaccio.com.

Project description: I am sharing a documentary theatre project I assigned in both my Introduction to Theatre (THEA 10100) at Hunter College and Theatre and Social Change at Pace University. Drawing from oral history, theatre, and film techniques, students were asked to create short documentary theatre pieces about coronavirus based on interviews and testimonies they collect from people in their communities. Students edited these testimonies to create a short play that they performed via Zoom. Many students interviewed family members, essential workers, and healthcare workers to create a tapestry of voices at the frontline of the pandemic in New York. The pieces in conversation with each other highlighted the hardships, realities, and resilience of the students during the pandemic.

Many of my students were also essential workers, taking care of sick and dying family members, and working full-time in addition to attending school. The documentary theatre pieces created by students captured how this moment is impacting their communities. I am sharing this assignment as a reflection to capture this moment, and as a tool for others to use in their classrooms. At a time where live theatre is entirely virtual – it is important to share creative theatre methodologies that can be used in the classroom and adaptable for any virtual platform

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KYONG MAZZARO | PH.D. PROGRAM IN POLITICAL SCIENCE | CONTACT: @KLMAZZARO (TWITTER) | EXPLORE KYONG’S PROJECT

Bio: Kyong Mazzaro is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY and a Fellow at the PublicsLab, CUNY. In her research, she uses mixed methods to study violence, electoral politics, and media freedom in Latin America. Kyong teaches comparative politics at Brooklyn College and Hunter College.

Project description: The pandemic pushed me to rethink my teaching and recognize the ways that political science teaching can be exclusionary. In this reflection, I share three teaching strategies that helped my students tap into their experiences to engage with and claim space in the discipline. I make the case that by (1) talking about the racist and exclusionary origins of academic conventions, (2) calling out language gatekeeping, and (3) articulating how there can be no rigor without diversity, we can broaden the scope of our work and make political science more inclusive.

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CARLI SNYDER | PH.D. PROGRAM IN HISTORY | CONTACT: CSNYDER1@GRADCENTER.CUNY.EDU | EXPLORE CARLI’S PROJECT

Bio: Carli Snyder is a Doctoral Student in History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She researches the politics of Holocaust memorialization and education in the United States during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. At Brooklyn College, she teaches World History courses including the Shaping of the Modern World and Myth and Memory in Modern World History. She has also worked in the Education department at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, where she facilitated school group visits, organized seminars on topics in Holocaust history, and annotated and made video clips out of testimonies from the Museum’s collection.

Project description: In Spring 2020, I was teaching a course called, “Myth and Memory in Modern World History.” My students and I explored how histories of slavery, colonization, and genocide are remembered globally. I am sharing an assignment my students completed: they suggested artifacts for a future exhibit about COVID-19. Ideas included: a photo of an empty Times Square, a copy of the stimulus check, and a Department of Education record of students borrowing technology for distance learning. This assignment helped me to better understand how my students experienced this historic moment as students, as young people, and as New Yorkers, while it unfolded.

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QUEENIE SUKHADIA | PH.D. PROGRAM IN ENGLISH | EXPLORE QUEENIE’S PROJECT

Bio: Queenie Sukhadia  (she/her) is a Doctoral Student in the Ph.D. Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Apart from being a scholar, she is also a creative writer and published a collection of short stories, A City of Sungazers, in 2017. Queenie is also Managing Editor of the Graduate Center newspaper, the Advocate, and works with the PublicsLab as a Mellon Humanities Public Scholar. She is passionate about making humanities scholarship & research available in the public sphere, and her Instagram project at @academiaforall is one way this commitment has taken shape. She holds a BA (with high honors) from Dartmouth College and an MA in English (with distinction) from Georgetown University.

Project description: Here, I offer a reflection on a project I had assigned to my First Year Writing class, which was disrupted by the pandemic and its social distancing imperative. I provide my students’ thoughts on undertaking this project during this time and my own perspective on supervising it. I want to share this work because: 1) It can serve as a teaching resource. The project is broken up into sequenced activities, which teachers can import into their own courses to creatively build rapport; 2) My reflection also demonstrates how the disruptions caused by the pandemic encourage us all to engage in creative play, which can be a quite generative exercise.

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KAREN ZAINO | PH.D. PROGRAM IN URBAN EDUCATION | CONTACT: KZAINO@GMAIL.COM | EXPLORE KAREN’S PROJECT (PART 1; PART 2)

Bio: Karen Zaino is a doctoral student in Urban Education at The Graduate Center, CUNY and a Graduate Teaching Fellow in English Education in the Queens College Secondary Education and Youth Services Department. Prior to graduate study, she was a high school English teacher for 12 years in Philadelphia, PA and Covington, KY. She has also worked as a project researcher for the CUNY Initiative on Immigration and Education, the CUNY-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals, and the College Access: Research and Action Center. Karen’s research leverages affect theory and critical literacy to re-conceptualize teacher education.

Project description: Following the Covid-19 outbreak in Spring 2020, our course objectives in Multimodal Writing in the Standards-Based Classroom shifted drastically. My students were first year teachers, and we used the asynchronous course blog and small-group synchronous check-ins as spaces to reflect, empathize, and troubleshoot how to best support their students. Course content shifted to the present moment, rather than pre-assigned texts. For their final project, students created an open access handbook for other English Language Arts teachers. These artifacts demonstrate the community we created together during a difficult period and our shared attempt to create a resource for others.