 Hello, and a very warm welcome to this next session, who is being presented by Luke Walter and Laurie Herson from City University of New York. And your session is entitled Community and Care in the Open, The Graduate Center's TLC during the pandemic. Over to you. Thank you, Louise, and thanks to Christina also for helping facilitate the session. I'm Luke Walter. I'm director of the Teaching and Learning Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, and I'm happy to be joined today by my colleague Laurie Herson, who works at the TLC as an open educational technologist. Our session today reflects upon how the Teaching and Learning Center responded to the pandemic when it hit New York City in early March of last year. We'll contextualize this work a little bit, and then we'll show several projects that we've been working on with colleagues at the Graduate Center and other campuses across CUNY. When the pandemic hit New York, it hit us fast and hard, and the city shut down within a matter of days. And it did so as ambulance sirens blared all day and all night, hospitals and morgues were overwhelmed, and the risk emerged of food and supply shortages throughout the month of March. The city was disoriented and traumatized, and the people teaching at CUNY were as well. Our center, the Teaching and Learning Center, supports graduate students who teach thousands of courses throughout the CUNY system, which is a 25 campus system that spans the city, and our students teach at every campus, and they teach more than 150,000 undergraduates every year. So the scale of the teaching is immense, and graduate center students teach as contingent faculty. They teach as graduate teaching fellows, they teach as adjuncts. They're not secure financially in terms of their status or their career. So this is a population that's already vulnerable, and this feeling was intensified, like all other feelings early last spring. The role of our center, then, is to foster, and this is true even before the pandemic hit, to foster community and connection among and between those groups of students, and to create spaces where they can come together across disciplines, experience level, and teaching interests to reflect not only upon their teaching, but upon their identities and development as teachers and scholars, about the systems and worlds we inhabit and build through the university, and about how they want to navigate this terrain with their values and commitments intact. So building and tending to community takes care, and as we moved into emergency mode and emergency remote teaching, amidst traumatizing uncertainty last spring, our top priority was to make sure that folks remained connected. This is true of the graduate students we supported and the undergraduates who they taught want to make sure that folks remained connected to the university, checked in upon care for. Lori? Thanks, Luke. So I want to introduce some of the open infrastructure we have at CUNY, because in my role as an open educational technologist, I had been supporting faculty using the open infrastructure already in place before the pandemic, and this work continued and evolved over the past year. So I primarily support graduate students and faculty from across CUNY teaching on our open source WordPress and buddy press platform, the CUNY academic commons, and much of that work involves introducing faculty to the platform, supporting their courses, and helping them integrate the CUNY commons and OER into their pedagogy. And just some background on the commons, you may have heard a little bit about it this morning, but the commons was founded in 2009 to support faculty initiatives and build community across CUNY through technology and to foster collaboration across the university. Faculty host courses on the commons, students create projects, different departments host their program websites on the commons, so it's a really dynamic space. And the commons has been growing ever since the year it was founded, and it now has almost 30,000 members. And it over the past year and even prior to that has become a really foundational support for open education at CUNY, serving CUNY's 25 campuses across the five boroughs. So during the COVID-19 pandemic, the commons served as a way to connect folks across CUNY, continue to serve that way, and also build community and share resources for navigating the university and teaching during the switch to fully online teaching during the pandemic. And over the past year, the platform has hosted over 600 courses and welcomed over 7,000 new members just in the past year. So it really serves as an integral space during the past year when we haven't been able to be together physically. And so all of the examples that you'll see today in our presentation are hosted on the CUNY academic commons and Manifold, which is another open source project developed at the CUNY Graduate Center, which allows users to create and teach with dynamic digital texts. And if you'd like to learn more about the commons at Manifold, you can check out our presentations from earlier today and also Matt Gold and Zach Davis gave a presentation on Manifold yesterday, so I just wanted to shout those out. So going back to March of last year, as we sensed the impending shutdown of the university in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we put together a series of resources to support faculty and ease the transition of courses and all forms of connection and collaboration online. Over this next year, we've been leveraging our open infrastructure and set up supports for instructional continuity and maintaining community and providing ongoing support. So one of the first things that we did, we helped to help faculty navigate the time of the switch to online during March of 2020. We put together a site called Instructional Continuity to provide resources for shifting to online teaching. And as part of that site, the TLC team produced an extensive guide titled Quick Tips on Transitioning Modes of Instruction from Face to Face to Online to help instructors reimagine and transition their teaching practices as quickly as possible from the classroom to an online environment, particularly while keeping the needs of CUNY students in mind. During the second week of March, when the campuses did shut down at CUNY, this site was the most visited on the commons with 6,000 page views, which is roughly 5% of page views. So people were looking for support and this site kind of served as an integral point of support in that moment. And sort of for my role, understanding the gravity and the stress of that moment, this site provided resources for various forms of ed tech. So I shifted into supporting faculty in that moment, advocating for accessible, ethical, student-centered, and flexible pedagogical practices through whatever tools faculty decided to use in that time. We soon realized that the messaging from the university across 25 campuses with 250,000 matriculating undergraduates and another 250,000 non-degree-seeking students. It's massive. We soon realized that messaging was just inconsistent and uneven. Faculty, not just our graduate students but faculty throughout the system, were just not finding answers to the questions about expectations, policy, or support resources. We knew this was translating into a catech experience for students and that the disruption was significant. So the day after we launched the considerations for instructional continuity site that Laurie just described, and as the TLC staff continued to refine the resources housed there, we launched a Slack space for faculty to come together from across the system to find help and then we recruited staff from other teaching and learning centers within the system to monitor and staff the space daily. All you needed was a CUNY email address to join. The team quickly grew to nearly 2,000 faculty members. We set up channels for each campus, particular technologies and disciplines and policy channels for official announcements as the university scrambled to get its arms around the crisis. We did this knowing Slack is not an open tool but that its ease of use and integration into the workflows that many of us already used allowed us to guarantee presence, responsiveness, care, and activity. Those qualities are key to successful communities. These spaces, the Slack spaces and the instructional continuity site and then individual consultations and workshops that we were doing got us through the spring by securing our connection with faculty, giving us ways and methods to triage and to track help requests and to direct faculty to the spaces within the university where help could best be received given what their needs were, and then to incorporate what we were learning about emergency remote teaching into the documentation we were building and refining for the community. So last spring, most of the work was about access, connection, helping faculty find ways to be flexible and supportive and more human with their students. That was a kind of key component of all of our communication. We didn't really pause going into the summer. Each year at the Teaching and Learning Center we run a summer institute which welcomes a new crop of graduate teaching fellows from 31 doctoral programs into their first college teaching experience. It helps them build a pedagogical foundation upon which they can grow in their time teaching at CUNY. We've run this institute in person for four years so in April and May we were forced to reconceptualize the event not only as an entirely virtual one but one that needed to prepare students for the fall which would mostly be online, would still be in an emergency. So it needed to prepare students both for in-person teaching and online teaching. We had about 80 students attend the institute. The institute was spaced out over four weeks in June and there was a time when many students at the Graduate Center and many of our staff were in the streets protesting the murder of George Floyd and this was a presence in our conversations and we were intentional about creating additional spaces in our seminars and our workshop curricula for reflection on the multiple layered traumas that many in our community were facing and to really think about wellness in its myriad forms. As part of the institute we created 20 asynchronous go-at-your-own-pace workshops and this work helped provide the foundation for GC Online which is another space that we launched at the end of the summer. We co-created this space with colleagues from the GC Digital Initiatives team, Mac Gold's team, to help the Graduate Center community specifically think about what an entirely fall 2020 semester would mean for graduate education. Here the approach was not about emergency remote teaching but to think about how to nudge a faculty who teach graduate students to approach their pedagogy with the same level of care and consideration that we were seeing from graduate students who were teaching undergraduates across CUNY. Over the summer we developed a dip dive dunk strategy, a bit of simple documentation, one pagers we call them, for those who didn't have much of an appetite for developing their practices, no judgment about that, maybe a little bit of silent judgment where we try to keep that to a minimum. Then workshops for those who wanted more guidance and support and then communities of practice for ongoing consultations, class visits, project building, more intensive training for those who wanted it. Over the summer Mac Gold and I were fortunate to secure funding from the Carnegie Foundation to hire several graduate students as educational technology fellows who we hired in the fall semester and they're working now and through this fall. That group's been working with the TLC and the digital initiatives team to offer robust support to graduate center faculty specifically about online teaching. So I also want to introduce some of our OER work that we've been doing during this time to continue to support faculty and graduate students teaching across CUNY. So in addition to hosting these sites and these points of support we have been actively creating our own open educational resources to support instructors developing and expanding and refining their pedagogy during this time. And one of the ways that we've done that is by hosting the TLC's workshop archive. So over the past several years fellows and staff at the teaching and learning center have been developing workshops and we have all these resources from our workshops we had not previously hosted those openly. So now the TLC workshop archive has sort of collected these teaching resources together and openly licensed them for all instructors to browse, share and remix for their own use. So our workshops and materials offer things for course design, teaching languages, place-based visual and affective pedagogies, creating alternative assignments and engaging in alternative methods of assessment. So these offer resources for instructors looking to expand their teaching so folks who work through those on their own time. But it also offers folks in faculty development, instructional designers to take our materials and use them in their own support structures at their institution. Each year the teaching and learning center publishes an updated version of our Teach at CUNY handbook which integrates the work and thinking that we do in dialogue with the Graduate Center and CUNY communities. And so every year it's revised to take on the commitments and approaches of our staff over time. We do this in manifolds you can actually see all of the previous iterations of the handbook there. And at last summer's institute all attendees annotated the handbook. We had hundreds of annotations and comments and questions in the margins. And this year those annotations have been guiding our revision which we're in the process of completing right now. At the heart of the handbook or the upcoming version, version four of the handbook are four core pedagogical principles that we urge new college teachers to build their teaching upon. We want teaching to be context-aware, responsive, intentional, and liberatory. These are categories of thinking, work, and methodology that travel across the 31 different doctoral programs from which we support students. So this year's revision will integrate work we've done on trauma-informed pedagogy and reparative and decarceral approaches to evaluation on abolitionist work in and around the classroom. And importantly, resistance to surveillance. Yes. So that's actually something that we've been working on in the past year in the TLC too. As we are switching online to all these platforms kind of as quickly as possible, just keeping our courses continuous. Something that I started working on with several TLC fellows was a project called Check Our Ed Tech, where we were supporting faculty on the tools that they wanted to use. But we also wanted to publicly reflect on the assumptions and the ethics of the tools that we were choosing to use in our courses. So with Atassi Das and Telysa Feliciano, we put together this Check Our Ed Tech, which was a Twitter project for public reflection to consider how these Ed Tech tools shape knowledge production, frame us as educators and require the questioning of assumptions that are embedded in our technologies. And Atassi reflected on how algorithms impact educational practices. Telysa did a Twitter thread on Zoom fatigue and exploring pedagogical issues resulted on our major shift to online. And then one of the last reflections that I did was related to a CUNY IT panel that we hosted on Ethics and Ed Tech at CUNY during and beyond the pandemic. So we brought faculty, staff from libraries and CTLs across CUNY in the law school who were advocating for ethical educational technology at CUNY. And in that panel, it was really interesting. We brought folks together from across CUNY to think about the ethics of this tech. And then earlier this year, we also did a screening of Coded Bias, which is a film directed by Shalini Kandhaya, which unpacks how algorithmic violence and surveillance disproportionately impact communities of color. And this really, we allowed, we opened up the screening to 100 people across CUNY. People screened it during a week on their own time. And then we hosted a public conversation. And it really demonstrated that there is interest in thinking through these things at CUNY. And so we hope to use the kind of this interest and this momentum from this screening and from the work that Luke's going to present to continue organizing around ethical Ed Tech at CUNY in the future. So this kind of advocacy and consciousness raising work that Laurie mentioned around check your Ed Tech is really core to the way that we approach our relationships within the university. Because of all these systems that we're involved with, we have some capacity to advocate and to raise awareness about, especially about the aggressiveness of Ed Tech companies in the space and the susceptibility of public institutions to their marketing. Several of us at the CUNY have been pushing for years for the university to more directly engage faculty, staff, and students in decision making about Ed Tech procurement. One, this is smart community building. It makes sense to do this. Right. Two, faculty, staff, and students also bring an ethical lens to thinking about these questions, which is sometimes secondary for those managing procurement process. In the fall, when we learned that CUNY was on the verge of signing a $2 million contract to extend the relationship with turn it in for three years, we organized quickly. My colleagues, Roxanne Shirazi and the GC's library, Lisa Rody and GC digital initiatives, and myself wrote testimony to the board of trustees protesting this contract. And within three days we had more than a thousand signatures from colleagues at CUNY. This wasn't successful, but it raised awareness of the system. Right. And as we come out of this pandemic and as we think about the university and what it's going to be in the coming years, right, we want these questions to be forefront in our minds. And we don't want the university to recreate the same problems, which are oftentimes resistant to approaches that prioritize care that existed before the pandemic. So we'll be keeping these things in mind. We can take a couple of questions now. I think we have a couple of minutes left. So we have first question on your screen there from Kyle. Any pushback from anyone read Advocacy for Ethical Ed Tech? How did you handle that? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's people who push back on the pedagogical arguments, right, who may not read some of the same same blogs in literature that we read, right, who thinks that students cheat and that surveillance is the way to address that. I think, you know, and some of that came directly after we circulated the letter, but mostly there's kind of evasion of the question, right, because the systems are so big and disconnected here, right, that we don't really have direct access to the procurement process. We have to fight our way to it. And that getting there is the biggest challenge. Yeah. I've got a comment there as well about raising awareness is good, even if you don't always succeed. And I think that's that's a kind of a message as well. It's like, you know, that constant, that constant action of resisting are against surveillance ed tech. We've got another one there from Hope. I don't know if you guys can see it yet. How do you talk to your graduate students in these overwhelming times about the overwhelming nature of thinking about all these things where their role is grad students? Is it possibly burdening them more by asking them to think about these things? Laura, do you want to take that one? Sure. Yeah, it's a lot to handle. I think we invite them into conversation, but we also say one thing at a time. If you're a first time graduate student designing a course, think about your course, think about what your goals are and what's important to you and take on what you can handle. We want to present these ideas to graduate students so they have them and can look back and maybe once they're moving forward, they can say, hey, I saw that idea and now I'm ready to try it. But one step at a time and get your course up and running, use the support structures that we have and then maybe the next semester you're open for trying something new. But it can be burdensome and it can be overwhelming. So one step at a time to get to get your feet wet and everything that we can present. Yeah, that's great. There's so much in this presentation. I just recommend people because we've got the slides that you put them. You've shared them in Discord. You've also got them in the YouTube chat as well. All the links for everything are within those slides. But I'd recommend maybe continuing the conversation in the hallway on Discord or maybe contacting you directly. But I just want to thank you both, Luke and Laurie. That's been really fascinating. Sorry to cut it so short, but I'm afraid we're out of time. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming, everyone. Thank you.