The 21st Annual CUNY IT Conference theme was “The Power and Perils of Scripting.” It took place in person on December 1 & 2, 2022 at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
From the student movements of the 1960s to the recent demands for anti-racist pedagogies, CUNY’s activist history is often invisible to students. Seeking to address this issue for the undergraduate classroom, the Baruch Center for Teaching and Learning combined game-based, digital, and primary source pedagogies to create an open educational resource (OER) called The CUNY 1969 project. This interactive digital platform explores the history of the Five Demands protest movement and invites students into a scripted narrative that incorporates a curated selection of text, recordings, interviews, newspaper articles, and flyers from archival collections across CUNY.
By providing a storyline and a simple digital interface for historical documents, we hope to reanimate the history of student activism at CUNY, re-engage with the archives that store it, and pass it down to undergraduates one classroom at a time. In addition to our in-house pedagogical and technical knowledge, we’ve drawn on CUNY faculty, staff, and alumni to develop an approach that balances a scripted gaming experience with student agency. This presentation explores our development process and the ongoing work of creating a free, narrative-based, online educational resource for CUNY students.
Presented by: Christopher Campbell, Seth Graves, Tamara Gubernat, Allison Lehr Samuels, Hamad Sindhi.
We invite you to access and download the slide deck at this link ← NOTE: should the slide decks be available for download?