CTL presents at the CUNY IT Conference: Teaching through Digital Narratives with the CUNY 1969 Project

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By providing a storyline and a simple digital interface for historical documents, we hope to reanimate the history of student activism at CUNY, re-engage with the archives that store it and pass it down to undergraduates one classroom at a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.

Hamad Sindhi, Digital Pedagogy Manager

Seth Graves, Interim Digital Pedagogy Manager

Pamela Thielman, Digital Pedagogy Specialist

Christopher Campbell, Digital Pedadogy Specialist

Allison Lehr-Samuels, Director

All of Center for Teaching and Learning, Baruch College

Please follow the link for more information and to register for the conference.