Photo courtesy of LaGuardia Community College.
The CUNY Humanities Alliance program was recently profiled by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation on their Shared Experiences blog for a new series on Community College-Research University Partnerships (CCUP).The series draws attention to community colleges as a site for innovative pedagogy in the humanities, and explores partnerships in this growing sector of higher education. As noted on the Mellon blog,
Community colleges represent one of this country’s major contributions to higher education. At the pinnacle of their expansion in the 1960s and 1970s, community colleges pioneered many of the core educational values and goals of the 21st century: access, diversity, affordability, innovation, community partnerships, distance learning, and career preparedness.
With generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Humanities Alliance is a partnership between the CUNY Graduate Center and LaGuardia Community College. Mellon’s CCUP series explores this partnership through interviews and stories about the practice of teaching and learning in the humanities at LaGuardia. The foundation’s staff gathered these stories by observing and interviewing several people involved with the program, including graduate fellows Anton Kociolek and Jonathan Kwan; faculty mentors Prof. Emmanuel Nartey and Prof. Joni Schwartz; GC faculty and Co-Director, Prof. Cathy Davidson; Director of Programs, Kaysi Holman; and Dr. Gail O. Mellow, President of LaGuardia Community College.
In this series, we will examine the different types of partnerships between community colleges and universities in an effort to increase the student-transfer success rate. We believe these efforts should also bolster support for the humanities and for university faculty and doctoral students who want first-hand experience with the diverse, inclusive classroom practices prevalent in community colleges.
College for Everyone: Cathy Davidson on The CUNY Humanities Alliance
Professor Cathy N. Davidson, Faculty Co-Director of the Humanities Alliance and Founding Director of the Futures Initiative, discusses the pedagogical underpinnings of the Humanities Alliance program, and what distinguishes the Graduate Center-LaGuardia CC partnership from other programs.
LaGuardia Community College Broadens Access and Strengthens Engagement for the Humanities
LaGuardia Community College President Gail O. Mellow reflects on the skills and experiences that LaGuardia faculty bring to the students they teach and mentor.
From Theory to Practice: Learning How to Teach the Humanities
CUNY Humanities Alliance Graduate Teaching Fellow (2016-17), Anton Kociolek on working with LaGuardia Community College faculty mentor Emmanuel Nartey to build an effective humanities-driven curriculum for students from diverse backgrounds.
