The CUNY Graduate Center’s Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) creates and connects opportunities for GC students to grow as educators within the nation’s largest public urban university system. The TLC prepares new college teachers for their entry into the classroom, guides developing teachers as they refine their practices, and helps students at the end of the time as graduate instructors think through how to best apply what they’ve learned in the next stages of their careers. The TLC’s programs are explicitly designed to engage with and integrate the concerns of the students whom it serves, and Graduate Center students take an active role in shaping the Center’s priorities and areas of focus. The TLC also works closely with faculty from across CUNY on a variety of pedagogical, digital, and advocacy initiatives. Unifying all TLC activities is a commitment to building and supporting community among educators teaching at CUNY.
Educational Development
Graduate Center students teach more than five thousand courses each academic year as Graduate Teaching Fellows and adjunct instructors. Most of these students come to the TLC at the end of their first year in graduate school, soon to be tasked with introducing CUNY undergraduates to fields they are just getting to know themselves. Many Graduate Center students did not attend college in the United States, and are unfamiliar with the American undergraduate educational system. Most have never visited another CUNY campus, and they have much to learn about CUNY, its students, and the role it has historically played in the life of New York City. Few have crafted syllabi or assignments, and most are anxious about doing their best. Much of our work focuses on helping GC students build the pedagogical foundations to successfully embrace the opportunity to grow as educators.
And then we build upon those foundations. Students come back for assistance, advice, support, and community. TLC Fellows, advanced doctoral students and experienced, committed educators act as peer mentors to their fellow graduate students, and broaden their own horizons by learning about teaching in different disciplines, academic program development and administration, and rhetorical strategies necessary to draw collaborators into a community of practice. Throughout this work we distill trends and conversations in the scholarship of teaching and learning and from the field of educational development for the CUNY context.
Research and Advocacy
The Teaching and Learning Center is committed to supporting pedagogies that are critical, responsive, intentional, and liberatory. We understand that pedagogy is more than the strategies that we use in our classrooms, and believe it encompasses our broader experiences navigating the university system and our commitments to learning beyond the institution. We take an active role in advocating for humane, ethical, and freedom-oriented practices in the spaces where we work, focusing on policies, practices, assumptions, and how resources are allocated and distributed. And we believe in protecting the spaces where learning happens so that the students and teachers who move through them maximize their transformative potential.
Educational Technology & Open Education
The Teaching and Learning Center has a particular interest in open education and in the technological infrastructure that makes it possible. We support the development of the Graduate Center’s two open source technology platforms, the CUNY Academic Commons and Manifold, and collaborate closely with Graduate Center’s Digital Initiatives and Mina Rees Library on the development of open educational resources, infrastructure, and programs to support open practices by GC faculty and students more broadly.
