The people students encounter in an introductory course help shape their understanding of a discipline. Textbooks give some contributors a great deal of attention and leave others with a brief mention or no place at all. As a critical scholar and psychology instructor, I want students to have opportunities to question those choices and explore the work that falls outside the dominant narrative.
I developed the Hidden Figures poster assignment while working with a team redesigning the shared PSY100 course at the College of Staten Island. The assignment became part of the course curriculum, and I first shared it through CUNY Academic Works in 2021. It was originally designed as an online group presentation. I now use it in both online and in-person teaching.
a broader curriculum
Students choose a person whose work interests them and research their life, education, career and contributions. The suggested list introduces scholars and practitioners whose work receives limited attention or is omitted from many introductory psychology textbooks. It includes people whose contributions open up questions about race, gender, culture, power and the purposes of psychological research.
Choice is an important part of the assignment. Even in an introductory course, students can explore an area they might want to study further or learn about someone whose experiences and work speak to them. Researching a person also creates room to consider how family circumstances, cultural background, education and access to opportunity shaped their work.
The assignment asks students to explain why that person’s contributions deserve attention. My aim is to make the curriculum more open to inquiry and give students an active role in deciding what their classmates should learn about the field.
Students prepare speaking notes and a one-slide poster organized around four sections: Background and Personal Life, Education and Training, Career Achievements and Contributions, and Other Interesting Facts. They use scholarly sources to support their research and include citations and references.
The poster gives the audience an outline to follow. Short phrases, relevant dates and images support the presentation, while the speaking notes contain the details, explanations and examples. This asks students to make decisions about what to show visually and how to explain what they have learned in their own words.
Adapting the assignment across disciplines
The assignment’s structure can work in many fields. An instructor can adapt the suggested contributors and section headings to examine people whose work has received limited recognition in their own discipline. It can be completed individually or in groups, with presentations delivered in person, live online or as recordings.
That flexibility is the focus of my 2026 revision, Hidden Figures: Poster Presentation Assignment. The revised materials include editable instructions, a suggested contributor list and a PowerPoint poster template. Instructors can set the presentation length, deadlines and submission requirements for their classes.
As of October 22, 2026, CUNY Academic Works records 282 downloads of the original assignment across more than 30 countries. Seeing that reach encouraged me to revisit the instructions and make the possibilities for adapting the assignment across disciplines more explicit.
This connects with the Futures Initiative’s work in critical pedagogy and equitable higher education. It gives students a way to examine how disciplinary knowledge is organized and whose contributions are recognized. Sharing the materials openly also gives instructors something concrete they can use and adapt for their own classrooms.
The original psychology assignment is available on CUNY Academic Works under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license. The 2026 interdisciplinary revision is currently under review there.
