Narratives of Race, Resistance, and Language Learning in College Classrooms

Carmen Kynard, Ph.D.Associate Professor of English, John Jay College/CUNY

Background Image: Black and Latinx students and community members march on City College/CUNY

demanding Open Admissions and Black Studies in 1969

As of 2014, CUNY’s total enrollment (both part time and full time students) was nearly 250,000 students, over 70% of which were students

of color.

“Ev’ry Goodbye Ain’t Gone”

Course Website:

http://www.digirhetorics.org/

The ProjectStudent sampling below is taken from a weebly

website:http://wethepeopleunified.weebly.com/

Narrative #3

“Pretty for a Black Girl”: New Registers of Black Vernacular

Insurgency

URL:bitly.com/andrene

Header and Top Navigation for “Pretty for a Black Girl”

Left Navigation Sample: “Burning through the Cerebral Cortex”

Close-up of Top Navigation for “Pretty for a Black Girl”

Footer for “Pretty for a Black Girl”

“They weren’t born from the

body, they were born from the

soul”“Mama Gave Birth to the

Soul Children” by Queen Latifah

featuring De La Soul (1989)

Denied the integrity of our words, we lose

possibility. In this sense our freedom depends

directly upon our ability to represent the events of

our lives… In telling the stories of our reality, both

private and public, spiritual and material, we

assert a future. The future, though always apparently beyond our control, is in actuality a continuing alternative,

one we actively construct out of our understanding of past events… language

powers the future.Gordon Pradl in his

introduction to Prospect and Retrospect: Selected Essays

of James Britton (1982)

The Fisk Continuum1) shifting racial demographics at our public schools and colleges, first most notably achieved in the 1970s where, for instance, for the first time in U.S. educational history, as many black students attended PWCs as HBCUs

2) a black protest movement that innovates and relies on the newest, most available technologies in order to push forth alternative sites of knowledge, cultural rhetorics, new authoring, and textual productions

3) new temporalities for cross-spatial, non-classroom-contained learning where our students’ connections to justice and aesthetics are centrally and critically informed by cultural, popular, and community movements

For More on Teaching and Classrooms

realwriting.org (my first year writing and advanced writing courses)

digirhetorics.org (my courses and projects related to digital rhetorics)

Blackwomenrhetproject.com (my courses related to gender studies)

carmenkynard.org (“Education, Liberation, and Black Radical Traditions”[main website])

funkdafied.org (courses related to African American rhetorics and literacies)

johnjay.digication.com/carmenkynard (Post-Tenure ePortfolio)