Application Deadline: December 15

The Futures Initiative advocates greater equity and innovation in higher education. Housed at and supported by the CUNY Graduate Center, our programs, both graduate and undergraduate, reach throughout the CUNY Community, striving to empower the next generation of intellectual leaders with bold, public, and engaged teaching and learning. 

One way we do this is by offering interdisciplinary team-taught courses between Graduate Center Central Line faculty and faculty from any of CUNY’s campuses, including professional schools, and in any field. The team-taught courses are one of the Futures Initiative’s key program areas. To date, the Futures Initiative has supported more than 40 courses at the Graduate Center. We are now seeking course proposals for Fall 2024 or Spring 2025.  

The team-taught courses create collaborations across the CUNY campuses and work towards a larger goal of public engagement. These courses are also designed to ensure greater diversity, interdisciplinarity, and pedagogical innovation among the Graduate Center’s course offerings. In addition to connecting faculty members from multiple CUNY colleges, by focusing on graduate pedagogy and ways doctoral students can apply student-centered methods in their own classrooms, the courses create renewed possibilities for graduate students to consider their dual role as learners and instructors.

While one instructor of accepted proposals must be a Graduate Center Central Line faculty, the team-taught courses are designed to offer CUNY campus-based faculty, especially faculty of color and junior faculty, the opportunity to teach a graduate course at the CUNY Graduate Center in their specialized area. Faculty also have the option to offer a small number of seats to eligible undergraduate students to enroll in a team-taught course through CUNY ePermit at the Graduate Center.  

The Futures Initiative’s funding allows both instructors of the team-taught course to be compensated as a full course (see the application for further details), with faculty teaching these courses designated as Faculty Fellows. In addition to supporting the team-teaching arrangement through a course buy-out for CUNY campus-based faculty, an honorarium of $1,000 is provided to each Faculty Fellow after a public facing event related to the course (an open course session, a panel, a workshop, publication, etc).  

Goals

• Diversity is a key goal of Futures Initiative courses, both in terms of who is teaching, what they teach, and how they teach it. Our FI courses are committed to inclusiveness in all of its forms.
• The Futures Initiative is especially interested in supporting diverse pairs of scholars from the GC and other CUNY colleges, including senior and junior faculty members who have not taught at the GC previously. We hope to support 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.
• 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.

Eligibility

• 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 based at another CUNY college. 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.***

The requirement of including a GC central line faculty member may 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. If you need assistance with identifying central line faculty members at the GC, please contact the Futures Initiative.

Questions may be addressed to Adashima Oyo, Executive Director, The Futures Initiative (aoyo@gc.cuny.edu)

Apply Here: Call for Proposals for Futures Initiative Team-Taught Courses: Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 (google.com)