While contingent faculty are rarely obligated to participate in college service or community outreach, both have been important parts of my development as a worker over the past several years. This has taken many forms, including

• running pedagogy workshops focused on issues local to the institutions where I work;
• helping to reform assessment in the departments where I work to be equitable and effective;
• formally and informally mentoring younger, underrepresented scholars, teachers, and students;
• continually developing technical skills in OER and digital accessibility
• engaging the community structures and resources that also serve our future students

The service experiences described here have occurred mainly over the last seven years. That period of time has been one of interrogation and self-examination, particularly for white people like myself.

The question of how to eradicate white supremacy in its subtle but pervasive and destructive forms is the question that began in earnest for me in 2015, during the inaugural session of the “Writing from the Margins” workshop sponsored by Apogee journal and hosted by the NY Writers Coalition. That this community-based collaboration between progressive literary organization shaped the way I work within an institution of higher education reflects a larger pattern in how I see service and outreach: integrated with what Stuart Hall once called the “organic intellectual” so that advances in the academy make their way quickly back into the community.

Pedagogy Workshops

• “Decolonizing Your Syllabi and Assignments,” (with Megan Skelly)

City College of New York/CUNY, English Department, October 30, 2020

(Link to Workshop Goals and Slides)

• “Multimodal Pedagogy” (with Shpresa Ahmeti)

Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program

CUNY Graduate Center, October 19, 2020

(Link to Workshop Goals and Tim’s Slides)

• Other pedagogy workshops have been presented at various regional conferences, including:
  • “Adventures in Retelling,” as part of a featured panel on “21st Century Student Writing,” TYCA-Northeast Conference, Portland, ME, October 26, 2019 (“Postcard”-style handout)
  • “Disability Studies in the Composition Classroom” was presented in Fall 2018 at:
    • Two-Year College Association-Northeast;
    • the New York College English Association conference; and
    • an Innovative Pedagogies Roundtable sponsored by Fordham University
  • Other presentations have covered issues in composition including:
    • digital annotation/social reading, CUNY IT Conference, 2010
    • consensus in the composition classroom at :
      • Peace & Justice Education Conference, Teachers College, Columbia, 2010
      • Feminist Pedagogy Conference, CUNY Graduate Center, 2010 

Mentorship

Formally, I have been lucky to participate in a mentorship “cluster” organized by my program. Informally, I have encouraged and given feedback to members of my cohort who teach at my campus, Lehman College. This work, like my pedagogy work, is justice-oriented work, aimed at minimizing what scholar Patricia Mathew, speaking at the Graduate Center in 2019, called the sense of “whiteness as an institution” at colleges and universities. Coming (back) to the academy after seven years of primarily interpreting shapes my sense of mentorship’s centrality. Interpreters see themselves as part of a “guild” in which mentorship is expected; I try to see teaching similarly.

I also recognize my pivotal role in opening up opportunities for my students. CUNY is often ranked among the institutions that create the most signifiant upward mobility for their students. Instructors at CUNY, and many other public institutions, have an obligation to support students on that path–logistically and emotionally. My own student experience at public institutions was shaped my mentors in and out of the classroom: then-graduate students like Susan Steinberg, Nick Montemarano, and Margaret Price shaped my college experience as much as any tenured faculty.

As an instructor who has as much close contact with students as any first-year instructor, I am often asked to support students as they work towards larger goals, such as internships and scholarships. Over the years, I have written many letters of support.

Here is an example (with the student’s name redacted) of one such letter composed in March 2020.

Equitable and Effective Assessment

Both at work and outside of work, the reform of student assessment is often on my mind.

As an instructor, I’ve participated in a variety of trainings focused on accessible teaching, effective online teaching (before and during COVID), and the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). I’ve also been formally involved in program-wide assessment of aspects of the first-year writing courses at both Lehman College and City College. In the case of the former, we’ve examined the alignment across courses of assignments with learning objectives. In the case of the latter, we assessed the effectiveness of a “theory of writing” reflective, end-of-term assignment. In addition to this service, at Union County College I served on a college-wide committee concerned with effective faculty advising.

The broader view of both assessment and advising that I gained through the above experience is in dialogue with more community-oriented literacy- and culture-making experiences.

Community-Based Work in Literacy

For many years, I facilitated generative creative writing workshops in the model of the late Pat Schneider. Organized by the NY Writers Coalition in partnership with community organizations, I was lucky enough to work with teen writers in Coney Island, cancer survivors in Hell’s Kitchen, seniors at an assisted living facility, and Deaf residents of public housing. If there is one origin for my sense that humility is central to the teacher’s role, it’s these workshops. The cliche is true: I always learned much more from my writers.

The more recent, and certainly perpetual, source of my humbling is from my work as a parent. The way this shapes my service and outreach varies. Sometimes I bring the embodied knowledge of a parent-professor to a workshop on close reading illustrated books with parents who are also students. (This sort of thing works best when there’s already an amazing office serving the needs of student parents, as one CUNY campus I’ve worked at had.) I’ve also had the chance to collaborate with other educators from the network of which my children’s school is a member. While recognizing the limits of my role as a parent, and making space for teachers, staff, and most of all the children on the call, participating in an “K-5 equity audit” opened my eyes to the world of progressive education that some–not all–of my students are able to enter my classroom with.

But perhaps the most humbling and most valuable place that my work at school made its way into the community came just before the pandemic hit. After much planning and discussion with parents, teachers, staff, and students, we launched a bilingual workshop in which parents and children came and read with each other using Megan Dowd Lambert’s “whole book approach.” We’d just gotten a half-dozen families on board when pandemic hit. Service and outreach: it’s humbling, fragile, time-consuming … and utterly essential.