Apply by October 21, 2019 to teach a team-taught course at the Graduate Center and serve as a Futures Initiative Faculty Fellow! Once again in 2020-2021, the Futures Initiative is pleased to support CUNY faculty at the Graduate Center and other CUNY colleges who are engaged in interdisciplinary team teaching. Selected faculty will be part of a cohort of Futures Initiative Faculty Fellows, and will receive $1,000 in research support.

Like last year, special consideration will be give to proposals that focus on introductory or required courses. Depending on the program, this could mean gateway courses, required first-year courses, research and methods courses, etc. The reason for this focus is that in surveying FI graduate students, fellows, and faculty and advisory board members about Graduate Center needs, we heard consistently that introductory and required graduate courses are an area where FI’s mission to advance innovation and equity—with diversity and critical pedagogy built into the course—would have greatest impact. To learn more about current and past course offerings, please visit https://futuresinitiative.org/courses.

In addition, a major goal of this program is to support diversity, equity, and inclusion—both in terms of the teaching faculty, and in terms of the course content is a major goal. The Futures Initiative is especially interested in supporting diverse pairs of scholars from the GC and the CUNY campuses, including senior and junior faculty members who have not taught at the GC previously.

To reach these goals, the Futures Initiative will support up to five graduate courses in any field that (1) have equity, diversity, inclusion, and innovation built into the course design and that (2) dedicate some of the course to graduate student teaching methods and translation of specialized research for a wider public, including the “public” of the undergraduate students being taught by our graduate students.

• – Focus: Bringing inclusion, interdisciplinarity, and innovative and engaged teaching methods into required/foundational/introductory graduate courses
• – Structure: Introductory/foundational graduate courses team-taught by GC and CUNY colleagues
• – Enhancements: Faculty research funds, program and technological support, community of faculty fellows, pedagogy workshops
• – Fields:  All fields welcome
• – Due Date: October 21, 2019
  APPLY HERE

Eligibility: Each faculty pair must include one central line Graduate Center faculty member and one CUNY faculty member based at another college (four-year or two-year). The requirement of including a GC central line faculty member could be flexed if the GC program commits to funding one faculty member’s participation. All disciplines are welcome. We especially encourage faculty members to consider diversity of all kinds in selecting a team-teaching partner.

For reference, you may wish to read about current courses or courses we have offered in prior years. Please contact Katina Rogers, Futures Initiative Co-Director, at krogers [at] gc.cuny.edu, with any questions or preliminary inquiries.

Please submit preliminary team-teaching and course ideas by October 21, 2019 using this simple form.

Key Elements of FI’s Team-Taught Courses:

Structure

• – One professor in each team-teaching pair must be a GC Central Line faculty member.
• – The Central Line faculty member’s program must agree to list the course as part of the program’s annual list courses, and must allow the course to count as part of that faculty member’s regular course load. (In other words, the Futures Initiative does not fund the Central Line faculty member’s participation.)
• – The other professor in each team-teaching pair must be a faculty member from one of the CUNY four-year or two-year campuses. The Futures Initiative provides a course buy-out to support this faculty member’s involvement, working through Provosts on both campuses. (This course should not be an “add on” to the faculty member’s workload; it should replace one course they would otherwise teach.)
• – At the end of the semester, the Futures Initiative will provide a formative course evaluation to both faculty and students to help us understand what is working and what we might adjust as we continue to refine the program.

Goals

• – Diversity is a key goal of FI courses, both in terms of who is teaching, what they teach, and how they teach it. The goal is to offer courses that model not only demographic inclusion but include an awareness of the changing demographic of college-age students in the structure, content, and goals of the course offerings. Our FI courses are committed to inclusiveness in all of its forms.
• – Critical pedagogy is another FI goal. FI courses include active, engaged learning, experiential learning, project-centered learning, both to offer graduate students the chance to develop as independent thinkers and to try out methods they might also use in the introductory courses they teach across the CUNY system.
• – A social equity component—relating course material to social issues, modeling higher education as a public good—is another important factor.

Enhancements

In addition to supporting the team-teaching arrangement through a course buy-out for CUNY campus-based faculty, FI offers:

• – Designation as a Faculty Fellow and membership on the FI Advisory Board
• – An honorarium for each faculty member to support designing and participating in a public Futures Initiative event, together with their students
• – An online academic community for your students (and their students)
• – Meet-ups for faculty to discuss and collaborate on syllabus, course design, pedagogy, technology, and other topics
• – Professional development seminars and writing retreats for graduate students
• – A monthly newsletter where we publicize events and publications by our faculty, graduate students, and other programs
• – An undergraduate leadership and peer mentorship program to which FI graduate students are encouraged to invite their undergraduate students to apply

Please submit preliminary team-teaching and course ideas by October 21, 2019 using this simple form.