Title of the proposal
‘Show Me Your City’: The Experiential Narrative & Critical Assessments Across Disciplines
Bio
Prof. Jessica Rogers (Substitute Full-Time Instructor) & Prof. Jason Cerrato (Substitute Full-Time Instructor)
Jessica Rogers teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Bronx Community College, CUNY. As an undergraduate, she studied at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Later she completed her MFA at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus, working closely with Lewis Warsh. She writes both prose and poetry, and loves both Jay and Charlie very much. Works can be read in The Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn Paramount, Poems from Penny Lane (Farfalla Press, 2003), and the chapbook Hot Water (Cy Gist Press, 2011), among others.
Jason Cerrato is an Instructor of Sociology and Political Science at Bronx Community College, CUNY. He received his MA from the New School for Social Research, and his research interests include visual culture, political theory, and epistemology.
General description of the initiative or project
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Indeed, the city is a place of the concealed: shifting landscapes casting shade over desires, duplicities, and at times, the sheer absurd. Ensconced within this space of concealment, identities emerge from a confluence of forces- forces which govern the city and our movements within. The urban tapestry and its web of ephemeral possibilities. And yet, a natural fact: given the literal speed and pace of change, the jarring tumult of transformation and reinvention, the city washes away just as many voices as it renders. For our students in particular, this notion of a ‘voice’ -of their own voice- may seem radical, strange, or severely disjunctive. By extension, the expression and development of one’s voice within the classroom can seem strikingly absent, or increasingly in some disciplines just plain uninvited. Regrettably, the empowering act of harnessing one’s ‘voice’ has been pushed aside under the looming encroachment of an educational culture which continually places an emphasis on standardization at the expense of creative autonomy.
In an attempt to run counter to this trend and to help carve out a space to reclaim such a ‘voice’, we’d like to share some of our own classroom techniques which promote the cultivation of student voices in the further elaboration of critical insights across disciplinary boundaries. In order to reaffirm the notion that unique (student) voices do indeed contribute to the constellation of broader social dialogues, we’d like to speak to the value of pairing cross-disciplinary content with creative writing activities in our community college courses in order to stimulate alternative forms and connections, edifying a space for students to situate everyday urban experiences within the unfolding of a complex, multi-layered social world.
Specifically, our presentation will focus upon the thematically-linked readings and coursework we employ from the disciplines of English, Sociology, and Political Science. One of the more pervasive motifs we jointly foreground in our own class discussions is the impact of urbanism on individual or group identity. In order to raise a critical awareness of the affect of social conditions on social identities, behaviors, possibilities, and vice-versa, we’d like to share our experiences facilitating the construction of a multimedia space within the classroom, built upon each student’s own unique experience living in such a densely urbanized environment like New York City.
The lesson plan is as follows: we begin by discussing a variety of essays, poems, and critical reflections, followed by the viewing of documentary and theatrical clips, and analysis of visual and audio media. Our archive offers a range of critical and fictional material from a diverse base of contemporary and classic sources, all of which have been selected in order to introduce some of the underlying themes which reemerge throughout the course. In addition, the readings and imagery seek to render a broad spectrum of consideration for cities themselves; punctuated by differing narrative forms and techniques, the goal is to convey the diversity of insight that may be achieved through the invocation of a variety of mediums and methodologies. Students literally “see” the city through the eyes of others, and in that recognition of difference, the value of diverse perspectives becomes clear.
After class discussions of the material, it is time for students themselves to describe what they ‘see’ and narrate some of their own urban experiences. We then distribute the assignment, “Show Me Your City”, and the instructions are as follows: first, using a digital camera (or something comparable, usually a camera equipped phone), take a picture of something that best represents their neighborhood- something that typifies or embodies, a salient or unique feature of their city, completely left to each student’s discretion. Second, student’s are asked to describe or decode that picture and discuss the basis of their selection; in essence, we ask for an individualized narrative of what an observer is seeing when they view the photo- a story, a memory, a descriptive remark that grounds and contextualizes. Here we encourage students to be adventurous (both in imagery selection and narrative form) and recall the value of alternative frameworks in enhancing and unlocking understanding.
Finally, all media is viewed in class and students briefly speak to their significance. Students moderate these discussions to a chorus of peers, and often times the result is a recognition that while we all have unique experiences in such a dynamic space, many of those experiences are motivated and underpinned by similar environmental features and constants (an inroad towards a critical awareness of a macro-social processes like urbanism which affect us deeply and distribute unevenly). Through the panoply of imagery, everyone in the classroom is informed of each other’s own unique perspectives; we all see the diversity of perspective and the value of our own voice in connecting expansive discourses and diverging experiences. Naturally, this mirrors the nature of the classroom environment, itself a stratified, diversely composed place. As a consequence, the archive and assignment seeks to produce a sense of community, of a cooperatively grounded and mutually respectful space within a class of very different people and experiences. From here, it is our hope that students will harness and utilize their own voice as we move through course content and activities.