This piece is part of a series by participants in the Winter 2026 Open Knowledge Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Marilyn Stotts is an educator and community organizer currently pursuing a PhD in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. She teaches a course on School Communities and Children at Lehman College and researches how families protest for equitable schools.

In the fall semester, I assigned a textbook that cost $130. For students working at NY’s minimum wage, that’s a full day’s work for a textbook published 12 years ago! It bothered me deeply, but it was my first time teaching this course about community, schools, and families (and college moreover), and I needed the textbook to teach me what to focus the class on. As a longtime educator new to teaching college, I had dreamt of leading a classroom where I could nurture students’ critical thinking and knowledge building, and push them as nascent scholars, without positioning myself as “dominant.” Requiring them to purchase an expensive textbook did not match this vision. Some adjunct instructors experience tight controls on what they can teach, but I was on the opposite end of the spectrum with a wide berth to tailor the course to my expertise and the students’ needs.

I set the tone for our class in the first week by naming my beliefs about our roles in the classroom. My messages were simple and direct: “You are choosing to be here on a Tuesday night, so I assume you have big goals, and I believe it is my job to support your goals, not to stand in your way.” Students nodded politely, but I knew my actions would matter more than what I said. The first test came from a fictional scenario in the required textbook. The book told a short yarn about a fictional bus driver saying mean things about Black children and concluded with something along the lines of, “The bus driver’s language was harsh, but we can’t know what is in his heart.”  Some students quietly signaled discomfort in their small group discussions. I wanted to amplify and support their criticality from my position as the instructor, so I spoke plainly, “I didn’t like that story when I read it because it’s an example of anti-Black racism. I don’t think the authors should have included it. It is not important what is in his heart because what he said was very harmful to the Black children in the story.” If I wanted a classroom environment where students can explore and write their counter-stories, I can’t be silent when a textbook offers stories that forgive racism without atonement. 

I hated that students spent their money to read this. So I started looking for other alternative textbooks, but that didn’t feel like the right solution because, well first they all cost a lot of money, and  second, focusing on a textbook crowds out readings from education luminaries like Gloria Ladson-Billings, Lisa Delpit, and Luis Moll. When I saw the email about the Open Knowledge Fellowship offered through CUNY Graduate Center’s Mina Rees Library….oh sweet relief! This program would enable and equip me to put together a syllabus that draws on the best readings in contemporary education research and aligns with my students’ interests at no cost to them. I was HONORED and RELIEVED a few weeks later when I was selected to participate. This semester, Spring 2026, I am better able to carry out my promise to support my students’ goals. In addition to reading Open Access resources, borrowing from the campus library, and digging into contemporary journalism about education policies and events, my students have read more rigorous and engaging texts than that $130 textbook and they’ve found Open Access resources on their own. To CUNY Graduate Students who feel the tensions inherent in leading classrooms as an adjunct, I highly recommend applying to future cohorts of the Open Knowledge Fellowship to find the community and the tools that will support your love of knowledge and your values for serving students.

This piece is part of a series by participants in the Winter 2026 Open Knowledge Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Juan Corredor-Garcia is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. He earned a BA in Political Science at Universidad del Rosario, a MPhil in Political Sociology at Sciences Po Bordeaux and Université de Bordeaux. He has worked as an Adjunct Instructor at Hunter, Lehman, and Fordham University.

The first time I learned about the existence of Open Educational Resources (OER) was back in Spring 2025 when I was invited to apply for the “Enhancing Your (Online or Hybrid) Course Through the Open Educational Resources (OER) Workshop” at Lehman College. This was part of a suggested training I should take before teaching a hybrid course in Comparative Politics. This course had an in-person weekly session and an online asynchronous component.  

I was struck by the outstanding pedagogical, teaching, and research opportunities that OER brings to the classroom. I learned that alternative forms of teaching, writing, and research were available to me and my students. Adopting zero-cost materials could be a form of assisting students in saving money for purchasing expensive textbooks without sacrificing quality and engagement. I found a few OER materials in Political Science in the form of introductory textbooks in the major subfield of the discipline, namely, American Politics, and two textbooks on my area of expertise: 1) Introduction to Comparative Government and Politics and 2) A Casebook for Comparative Politics. I updated my syllabus, included chapters from these two textbooks, and adopted OER for the course I taught at Lehman College in Fall 2025.  

This first encounter increased my desire to engage in more detail with OER. I applied to the Open Knowledge Fellowship with three purposes: to become part of a larger community of Graduate Center instructors who were engaging with OER, to get a deeper understanding of research and pedagogical tools with Manifold and CUNY Academic Commons, and to propose to create an open-license manuscript of my master’s thesis.  

My experience with the Open Knowledge Fellowship was formidable. I found inspiration, passion, and innovation from former fellows and instructors. I also learned about great tools used by current fellows in courses they were teaching in very different fields like Art History, Biology, Italian, and Criminal Justice, to name just a few cases. I appreciated how rough ideas started as drafts and then became excellent tools for developing pedagogical websites. But the most important takeaway was that the adoption of OER is a scaffolding process that requires constant work: perseverance is the strategy to develop sound OER projects.  There is a lot of independent work, but when you share these materials with your students, class engagement and participation are remarkably higher than when you use old-fashioned materials.  

My fellowship journey culminated with a big surprise. In the first week of the fellowship, I searched for new textbooks on my subfield but only found the existing textbooks that I used for my Fall 2025 course. Yet I found an updated version of one of these textbooks. In the introduction of A Casebook for Comparative Politics,  the editor of the volume, Mark Johnson, indicated that new cases were under development and will be released in new version through the middle of 2026, and that potential contributors should reach out to him for further information.  

I sent an email to Mark with the idea of proposing a new chapter on Colombia, the country where I was born and raised. This textbook is intended to serve as a companion text for lower-division undergraduate courses in Comparative Politics. The textbook included cases from Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America, but only one case in Latin America and the Caribbean: Cuba. I thought that I could write something about Colombia that would help inspire undergraduate students to learn more about political cases in the Global South that contradict the assumptions of comparative politics, such as that democracy cannot coexist with violence, and that economic development is not possible if political instability remains. Colombia has been a relative stable democracy in a region with constant coup d’états and dictatorships. Nevertheless, this political stability coexists with an internal civil war that lasted 60 years and transformed into post-war violence after 2016. The democratic contradiction in Colombia is worth exploring because it surpasses binaristic understandings of democratic regimes as merely peaceful countries, and autocratic regimes as exclusively violent countries. Colombia, despite its extremely high levels of violence, is a country known for its many peace efforts, negotiations, and agreements in 1958, 1982, 1986, 1990, 1994, 1998, and 2012.  

I was lucky enough to get a positive response from Dr. Johnson who kindly agreed to allow me to write the chapter on Colombia for the new version of the edited volume, to be published by the end of 2026. Therefore, instead of writing a full manuscript in CUNY Pressbooks–my original idea when I applied for the fellowship—this excellent news meant I could accomplish a more reasonable goal in the Open Knowledge Fellowship).  

While my fellowship journey consisted of individual research, the examples of other OER projects I encountered in the fellowship have inspired me to pursue more collaborative projects with my students in the future. I designed a scaffold assignment in my Comparative Politics course where students should submit country briefs with several deliverables every two or three weeks. Nevertheless, one of the problems is that the student contributions only stay in Brightspace. A future project could involve the same scaffold assignment to be published in Manifold. Based on what I learned in the Fellowship, I will eventually develop a Manifold project inviting students to become writers of blog entries about countries they choose to work on during a semester.    I am confident that students will value an assignment like this because their labor will be hosted on a public website, in a publication that they can eventually include in their curriculum vitae. But this is part of another journey I am hoping to co-create in the future.  

This piece is part of a series by participants in the Winter 2026 Open Knowledge Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Lisa Di Battista is a language instructor at Hunter College and Lehman College, CUNY, teaching Elementary Italian. Her work focuses on accessible language pedagogy and inclusive classroom practices. She is committed to designing courses that reduce barriers to participation and foster student confidence from the first day of class.

In more than one semester, and in more than one class, I have heard a version of the same sentence from students: “I can’t afford the book yet.” Or sometimes: “I’ll try to get it next week.” Or, more quietly: “I don’t have it.”

In an elementary language course, not having the textbook is not a small inconvenience. It means not having a guide. It means not having structured exercises to review from. It often means not taking notes because the student assumes the book will eventually “explain everything.” When that book never arrives, the student falls behind—not because of ability or motivation, but because of access.

That recurring experience is what led me to apply for the Open Knowledge Fellowship. I wanted to rethink whether a commercial textbook should be the backbone of an introductory Italian language course at a public university like CUNY. If the first weeks of a course already create a divide between those who can immediately purchase materials and those who cannot, then something fundamental needs to shift.

Through the Fellowship, I redesigned my Elementary Italian course so that all required materials are freely accessible from the first day of class. Instead of relying on a single textbook, I curated and organized a range of open resources—grammar explanations, vocabulary lists, short readings, listening activities, and cultural materials—and assembled them into a coherent digital course site.

The process was not simple. Unlike some other disciplines, open educational resources for Italian language instruction are often scattered. It is easier to find individual worksheets or isolated grammar explanations than a complete, structured curriculum. There is no perfect open textbook that fully replaces a commercial one. As a result, redesigning the course required careful selection, sequencing, and adaptation.

In many ways, this constraint became an opportunity. Rather than trying to replicate a textbook chapter by chapter, I asked myself: What do my students truly need in order to begin speaking, reading, and writing in Italian? What forms of practice are most meaningful? How can cultural materials be integrated from the start, rather than treated as secondary?

The result is a course that feels more flexible and more responsive. Because the materials are digital and open, I can revise them throughout the semester, add contemporary cultural content, and adjust explanations as confusion emerges. Students can access everything from their phones, laptops, or library computers without waiting for financial aid or sharing PDFs informally.

Most importantly, from day one, everyone is working from the same page—literally and figuratively.

For CUNY students, this shift matters. Many of my students balance work, family responsibilities, and full course loads. The cost of textbooks is not abstract; it is part of a larger calculation about rent, transportation, and food. Removing that cost does not solve every structural challenge, but it removes an immediate barrier to engagement.

In a language classroom, engagement is everything. Students need to practice regularly, revisit materials, and feel supported as they make mistakes. When access to core materials is uncertain, confidence erodes quickly. By making the course fully open, I hope to create a more stable foundation—one in which participation is not delayed by affordability.

One area that remains a challenge is assessment. Commercial textbooks often come with ready-made quizzes, online platforms, and automated grading systems. When working with open resources, instructors must rethink how to design assessments that align with the curated materials while remaining fair, rigorous, and sustainable. This ongoing question has pushed me to design more communicative assessments—short written reflections, recorded speaking tasks, and in-class activities—that prioritize language use over workbook-style completion.

The move to open resources has therefore reshaped not only what my students read, but how I evaluate their learning.

Below are some of the open resources that informed my course redesign:

• Open-access Italian grammar materials and worksheets available through OER Commons
• Publicly available Italian news clips and cultural media archives
• Openly licensed language-learning videos and pronunciation guides
• Digital flashcard tools and collaborative vocabulary platforms

The full open course site can be accessed here: Italian 112

If learning a new language means learning to inhabit a new voice, then the first responsibility of an instructor is to ensure that nothing prevents students from beginning to speak. Making my Elementary Italian course open is not a final solution, but it is a concrete step toward aligning my teaching practices with the realities my students navigate every day.

Today is Commencement Day at the Graduate Center, and we are again marking the occasion by celebrating the culminating works of our graduates, most of which are deposited in the Mina Rees Library to be preserved and made available to researchers and, ultimately, the public. We now hold just over 18,000 dissertations, theses, and capstone projects in our collection across print and digital formats, with more than 5,000 works submitted digitally after we ceased archiving bound copies in 2015. 

Before we get to this year’s round-up of new works, let’s linger a moment on what it means to steward digital collections in the library. I don’t need to remind anyone (but I will) that generative AI hit the scene four years ago, and whether we think of these consumer-facing products as “plagiarism machines” or “reasoning engines,” we’ve all come to understand the industry’s need for textual data to train the models used by these tools. It turns out that open access library collections have become prime targets for bots behaving badly. As one resource puts it, “the nature of traffic on the Web has changed,” and digital libraries now have to deal with “aggressive, adaptive, and evasive web crawlers” that threaten our infrastructure and our ability to make materials broadly accessible. 

Sadly, one solution seems to be adding “friction” to the online experience; those interstitial pages asking us to verify our humanity are like speed bumps to deter the machines straining our systems with their incessant requests. CUNY’s institutional repository platform is managed by a vendor (the biggest vendor!) so our technical infrastructure is perhaps safe, but our graduate authors now come to us with another worry about making their research available: will it be used to train AI models? We are seeing more students embargo their works: 67% of this year’s dissertations had some form of access restriction (that number drops to 55% when we include master’s theses and capstones). While the library can’t control bad actors on the open web, we can work, at least, to ensure that the vendors we contract with can’t use our student works as training data for their own products without our consent (and, good news: all new NYS contracts have such provisions). I hope that we can thread the needle of protecting intellectual property rights while re-committing to broad, if not entirely friction-less, access to publicly-funded research.

In another sign that the digital publishing landscape is changing, the Dissertation Office began to see more formal AI disclosures in the manuscripts this year. We often think of the dissertation deposit process as a proto-publication experience—a dry run for what will occur when graduates move into their fields and begin formally publishing their work (though, of course, many dissertation authors have already published portions of it). Understanding the restrictions of copyright and navigating permission structures, avoiding plagiarism (and self-plagiarism), and fine-tuning the presentation of their data in tables and figures are some of the mechanics of manuscript preparation that depositing a dissertation or thesis has always developed. Now, as scholarly publishers begin to find their way with requirements around AI disclosure, we’re seeing more of that come into the dissertations and theses that are deposited in the library. 

What do these disclosures look like? Here’s one example: 

The author used Claude (Anthropic) for assistance with LaTeX formatting, copy-editing, code syntax, and generating alt text for figures. No AI tools were used in the design, execution, or interpretation of the research presented in this dissertation. The author takes full responsibility for all content.

Should the Graduate Center develop its own requirements for disclosing the use of AI in a dissertation or thesis? As with most issues in scholarly publishing, there are disciplinary considerations that make it difficult to dictate a single approach for all fields. Resnick and Hosseini (2025) suggest a framework of mandatory, optional, or unnecessary disclosure of AI use for scientific publications, although some of their emphasis on reproducibility might not translate to the arts and humanities. So, for now, the Library is taking the approach—as we do with many of our manuscript preparation guidelines—that graduates should follow the conventions of their discipline and align with publishing practices common in their field. We naturally expect that authors will take full responsibility for the work; do we really need them to state it outright? Perhaps.

But enough about AI and scholarly publishing, that’s not why you’re here! Let’s dig into the research that our graduates have produced and celebrate their accomplishments. This year, the library accepted 433 deposits: 291 doctoral dissertations, 7 doctoral capstone projects, 96 master’s theses, and 39 master’s capstone projects. You can browse them all in CUNY Academic Works.

The Ph.D. Program in Psychology again led with the largest number of doctoral dissertations deposited (38), followed by Biology (28), and we had a four-way tie for third place with Business, Chemistry, Music, and Urban Education each with 14. For the master’s students, the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies had the most deposits (28 theses and capstones), followed by Cognitive Neuroscience (17), Data Analysis & Visualization (16), and Astrophysics and Political Science both came in fifth place with 15 theses deposited by students in their programs.

In a year indelibly marked by anti-migrant terror within our occupied cities and across militarized borders, we should celebrate our Graduate Center students writing about migrant justice and collective liberation, exploring immigration policy  in Colombia and South Korea), theorizing migrant displacement as a literary genre, and revealing the precarity of migrant labor (in sex work and small food businesses, to name two). I can’t possibly cover them all, so please—search, browse, and explore them on your own in our online collection.

You’ll see that our graduates are experimenting with mixed methods and creating new methodological frameworks themselves. Amyleth Vargas (M.A., Liberal Studies, September ‘25) combines autoethnography and archival research to explore the construction of public memory in “Brownsville Taught Me: Reframing the Public Memory of Brownsville’s History,” while David Milley (Ph.D., Anthropology, February ‘26) offers a methodological alternative to the “false dichotomy between humanistic and scientific traditions in archaeology” by joining phenomenology and GIS as complementary lenses in “Sensing Prehistory: A Framework Reconciling Scientific Modeling and Human Experience Through Affordance Theory.” 

We have explorations of queer ecologies on Riis beach and visual culture in Stalinist Poland; anti-ableist spectatorship in East Asian regional theater and sonic performances of Afro-Cubans in Florida; a photographic and gendered history of the Algerian War and oral histories of tech worker organizing. 

You’ll find critical examinations of sport and public spaces in master’s capstones like “The New York City Fields of Calcio Libero: Where Protagonists Activate Counter-Hegemony” (Olivia Soderini, M.A., International Migration Studies, June ‘26) and “Courts of New York: A Visual Atlas of the City’s Public Basketball Spaces” (Nathaniel Rattner, M.S., Data Analysis & Visualization, February ‘26), alongside doctoral dissertations on the privatized public space of Hudson Yards and the effects of gentrification on public health across New York City. 

Graduates in the sciences are contributing novel approaches to material problems like adapting lithium-ion batteries for use in extreme conditions and scaling grid energy storage. They are investigating cognitive difficulties in breast cancer survivors, studying the role of molecular imaging in gynecological pathologies, and working towards  therapeutic applications for age-related blindness. We have works on dragonflies, butterflies, and even sleep regulation in fruit flies; from working memory in bottlenose dolphins and cat-human play to tarantula toxin and Andean bird fauna, you will not be disappointed! 

And now, the milestones:

Longest dissertation: “Cecil Taylor, 1950–1976: Theory & Practice in His Own Words” by Michelle Yom (Ph.D., Music, February  ‘26) at 450 pages.

Note: This year, I looked at the length of the text, including bibliography, but tried to exclude appendices and illustrations. That said, there are two notable mentions to be made for students who included significant amounts of supplementary materials that pushed them each towards 900 pages!

“Sensing Prehistory: A Framework Reconciling Scientific Modeling and Human Experience Through Affordance Theory” by David Milley (Ph.D., Anthropology, February ‘26) at 877 pages

“Form and Structure in African Music: Four Case Studies in San, Por Por, Ewe, and Aka Music” by Bai Xue (Ph.D., Music, September ‘25) at 954 pages

Shortest dissertation: “Quiver of Affine Monoid of a Vector Space Over Finite Field” by James Junie Chen Cleary (Ph.D., Mathematics, June ‘26) at 45 pages.

Longest title: “Fostering Ecological Consciousness in An Era of Collapse: Reimagining the Purpose of Environmental Education through Collaborative Curriculum Development with Radical Environmental Educators and Activists in the Hudson Valley of New York” by Matthew Devine (Ph.D., Psychology, February  ‘26)

Shortest title: “Systems Epistemology” by Boris Ayala (Ph.D., Philosophy, February  ‘26)

The Graduate Center has always been a special place where disciplines intersect and faculty and students do meaningful, imaginative, and exceptional work that centers the public good over private gain. Let’s keep showing up, keep working together, and keep ourselves grounded in the fight for a more just world, con los pies en la tierra.

Congratulations, Class of 2026!

The Mina Rees library is pleased to introduce Rachel Finn, who has recently joined the Dissertation Office as an adjunct reference librarian. Prof. Finn is also an adjunct instructor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Queens College. In the Graduate Center Dissertation Office, she will review submitted manuscripts, provide instruction and guidance in manuscript preparation, and generally assist students with depositing a dissertation, thesis, and capstone project in the library.

Rachel is a writer, librarian, and archivist. She’s worked at various institutions in New York City and upstate in those capacities. Most recently she served as the History and Humanities Librarian at Barnard College, where she started a new Food Studies collection and worked with Special Collections and Archives to bring a large collection of historical cookbooks to the library. In addition to her library experience, Prof. Finn is an independent food researcher and food writer whose work has appeared in popular and scholarly print and electronic publications. She has also worked for many years as a freelance editor and proofreader for major educational publishers. Prior to becoming a librarian, Rachel worked as a high school teacher in Chicago public schools. She holds a Master’s in Education from DePaul University and a Master’s in Library and Information Science from Pratt Institute.

Rachel is currently working on a long-term project dedicated to documenting the food history and food culture of African Americans and the global African Diaspora. In her spare time, she collects cookbooks and tries new recipes, studies herbalism, knits, tends to her plants (lots of plants), and after a trip last year to Uruguay she can’t wait to get back to traveling off the beaten path.

This piece is part of a series by participants in the Winter 2026 Open Knowledge Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Juan Rúa-Serna is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the City University of New York, The Graduate Center, concentrating in International Relations and Comparative Politics. His research examines the links between immigration, political participation, and integration.

Teaching in the age of generative artificial intelligence sometimes feels like becoming a cop. There is a system of lawful practices: reading, highlighting ideas, taking notes, thinking, writing more notes, and finally coming up with one’s own ideas and words. That is the standard. Breaking the law entails bypassing these behaviors—for instance, having an AI model read for you, summarize the argument, and write the draft. Suddenly, you find yourself suspecting your students. Is this something a student would write? Is this AI? What “big word” or phrasing will rat the student out? Since being a cop is the last thing I want to be, I decided that my approach would not be based on enforcing “academic law,” but on opening up opportunities for students to learn in a creative, lively, collective, and meaningful fashion. The Open Education Resources (OER) approach is a key ally in teaching for this purpose.

My intuition is that many social science students turn to artificial intelligence as a response to financial barriers and incentives deeply ingrained in the logic of academia. Accessing a variety of learning resources can be prohibitively expensive. Few students can afford a private tutor to deepen their knowledge; many lack the time or energy to utilize office hours effectively, and others lack the social and cultural capital to engage in networks of collective learning. While universities often provide writing support, the act of composing and editing remains a daunting task. AI, then, appears as a solution. Platforms offer free models, and tech giants like Google provide free subscriptions to students. For those who cannot afford supplemental materials or one-on-one tutoring, AI becomes a highly attractive tool for improving their “results.” It is marketed as a free tutor, a research assistant, and an ever-present, “understanding” companion for learning.

The OER approach addresses this challenge by offering a variety of materials used to build more engaging content and present students with diverse strategies for learning. This approach goes well beyond merely finding free textbooks; inspired by the spirit of open knowledge, many scholars have developed a myriad of materials to motivate students to think creatively. For instance, role-play games and simulations encourage students to use their imagination to navigate social issues. Case studies allow them to apply theories to concrete, empirical realities, while archival materials connect abstract theory to tangible history. All of these are powerful ways to invite students to question the world around them. Platforms such as the OER Commons are excellent places to find these resources. Ultimately, providing a variety of sources and “languages” that speak to the same issue helps students reach their own unique understandings.

Integrating art is particularly conducive to this result. Political Science, as a discipline, can draw on a vast legacy of art created to address major historical and political phenomena. Many significant paintings, drawings, and photographs capable of sparking powerful thinking and conversation are now in the public domain and can be integrated into a variety of assignments. Consider this brief example:

Imagine you are teaching about the German unification process. You will probably assign some big names to your syllabus: the Hans Ulrich Wehlers, the Wolfgang Mommsens, and so on. You should. Using the painter Anton von Werner’s work, however, can be an amazing vehicle to get students to think deeply about the weight Bismarck carried during the unification process. He was not the Emperor, and yet in the painting, he is the one who looks like one: imposing, the highest of all, even if he is physically lower than the Emperor. Students can also think about the location: the proclamation of the German Empire occurring in France, in the Palace of Versailles. It wasn’t an act of conquest—as the Germans did not annex France into their regime—but something else. What else? What does this choice say about the tensions and the messy history shared by these two countries? A wealth of questions appear here.

This connects to the second point I mentioned earlier: “incentives.” We face one primary incentive: to consume many, many ideas and readings, and then to produce and write as fast as possible—to write, produce, publish, present, discuss, and publish again (and again, and again, and again). We are pushed to edit as many books as we can and contribute to as many journals as we are invited to. This incentive often leads us to follow practices that standardize how we think. Most AI models are, I believe, a mere reflection of the way academia has already standardized our intelligence. The OER approach is an opportunity to “breaking out the black box.” Before starting this fellowship, I thought OER was simply about finding free PDFs for my students and making sure everything was easy to find. It is way more than that. OER gives you access to all kinds of materials that express different logics, cultures, and ways of thinking—all of which you can incorporate into a program that seeks to explore different ways of learning.I recognize these ideas face a significant hurdle. AI will continue to be a primary assistant for students who simply do not have the time or energy to complete all their coursework on their own. Students who work, have heavy caregiving responsibilities, or are dealing with serious health or family issues will still have strong incentives to have AI read and write for them. However, within the limitations of what we can do, OER gives us more tools to design classes that can become sites of creativity, sensibility, and joy.

The Open Knowledge Fellowship team is excited to announce that there is a new website for all things “Open” at the Mina Rees Library. We’re pleased to present a central showcase for the Open Knowledge Fellowship, our ongoing multi-week intensive for doctoral students teaching at CUNY. Over 200 individuals have participated since the Fellowship’s inception in 2020, and you can see the wide variety of their disciplines and research interests, through biographical descriptions listing their projects. For a deeper dive, take a look at the series of short essays created as the students reflect on their work (i.e., Waist-deep in OER, Towards a Collective Pursuit of Knowledge, Teaching (and Reforming) the Next Generation of Pirates and Copyright Violators).

Aside from information about the Open Knowledge Fellowship, the new website provides comprehensive resources for accessing and utilizing OER across CUNY. There are links to all of CUNY’s Open Publishing platforms, as well as to helpful resources regarding accessibility and campus OER representatives. We have also included a page of publications & presentations, including a Manifold publication exploring the poet Adrienne Rich’s teaching materials from her time at CUNY. 

The Open Knowledge team consists of founder of the program and Head of Reference, Elvis Bakaitis; Scholarly Communications Librarian & University Liaison, Jill Cirasella; Adjunct Reference Librarian, Margaret Miller; Open Educational Resources Specialist, Patrick McGee; and Chief Librarian Maura Smale. You can learn more about their research and scholarly backgrounds here. In recent years, the program has also hosted guest lectures from CUNY faculty such as Prof. Shawna Brandle; Prof. Ian McDermott; Prof. Junior Tidal, as well as GC library faculty colleagues. 

The Open Knowledge Fellowship is supported through robust funding from New York State, administered by the CUNY Office of Library Services. The Open Knowledge Fellowship was started as the Open Pedagogy Fellowship in 2019, organizing a series of symposia that interrogated the question of “Open” from critical perspectives, with contributions from speakers such as Clelia Rodríguez (author of Decolonizing Academia: Poverty, Oppression and Pain), Nora Almeida. In 2021, the Open Pedagogy Fellowship became the Open Knowledge Intensive, hosting events on the emerging field of black girlhood(s) and the possibilities for abolitionist STEM education. In 2022, the Intensive became the Open Knowledge Fellowship and has run at least two cohorts a year ever since. 

We are additionally proud to share that since 2019, the library’s Open Knowledge project has assisted nearly 250 fellows in the conversion of course syllabi to Zero Textbook Cost courses, saving students thousands of dollars and simultaneously contributing to CUNY’s digital publishing ecosystem. During this time, Fellowship participants have been sustained by over $500,000 in support via OER funding from New York State. 

The new website was designed by our Open Educational Resources Specialist, Patrick McGee. All of the images are sourced from the Wikimedia Commons (referenced in the alt text), and we encourage you to take a closer look as you explore the landing page for Open Knowledge at the Mina Rees Library. You can expect the page to be consistently updated with the latest CUNY OER news and resources. Please reach out to Patrick McGee (pmcgee@gc.cuny.edu) if you have any questions or suggestions for the new site. 

 
Visit the site: Open Knowledge at the Mina Rees Library

This piece is part of a series by participants in the Winter 2026 Open Knowledge Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Fortunatus Ezebuo is a PhD student in Biochemistry at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. He is currently conducting research on human sodium ion channels and peptide toxins. Fortunatus holds a PhD degree in Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry from Nnamdi Azikiwe University. He currently teaches introductory chemistry laboratory courses at College of Staten Island of The City University of New York.

I was initially drawn to the Open Education Resources (OER) Fellowship because it spoke to my personal and professional interest in issues of access, affordability, inclusivity, and transparency in higher education. In my teaching, I strive to create accessible, student-centered learning experiences. This involves the incorporation of a range of digital tools, formative assessments, and collaborative learning strategies to promote engagement and deeper understanding of course materials. 

There are lots of OER materials in chemistry courses but finding individual material that matches all of the required course contents for the chemistry laboratory courses that I teach was not possible for me during the OER fellowship. This is mainly due to differences in experiment protocols, equipment, experiment duration, reagents, etc. Also, modified experiment protocols may pose a challenge to the acceptance of an OER adapted syllabus by the department, since it will interfere with course scheduling. 

To overcome the problem of not finding individual OER materials that matched all of the required course contents for the chemistry laboratory courses, I obtained OER materials from different sources. Now, I have the ability to adapt, remix, and contextualize these materials to meet the needs of my students, before seeking approval from the relevant authorities at the College of Staten Island. The adapted/remixed syllabus and course site not only supports my teaching, but allows for more active learning through customized content. It removes financial barriers that might have hindered student success in my class, while enhancing accessibility, inclusivity, and student empowerment.

This piece is part of a series by participants in the Winter 2026 Open Knowledge Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Reina Gattuso (she/her) lives, teaches, and writes in New York City. She’s a teacher at Hunter College, a contributing writer to the cultural learning platform Curationist, a PhD student in cultural anthropology, and a student of kathak dance.

It is contradictory to say that anthropology is for everyone, because historically it decidedly has not been. When teaching anthropological history, we grapple with the fact that colonial officials looking to catalogue and control the people they claimed to rule were key to the founding of anthropology as an academic discipline – and as a weapon to inflict discipline. So, how can learning anthropology help CUNY students and our broader community (including those of us who call ourselves teachers!) access the liberatory and transformative education we all deserve?

For me, this starts with participant observation, anthropology’s classic tool. Participant observation is when we participate in…and observe…the world, in order to learn about and develop our understanding of human social life. How does the society I’ve been plopped down into function? Are all cultures like this? How could the world look different? From the time we’re babies learning to communicate with our caretakers – experimenting to see how many times the grownups will pick up the food we playfully drop on the floor – all human beings do participant observation. And all human beings are experts on our own social lives. 

At its most democratic, then, anthropology is simply a set of tools and resources that helps us make sense of what we already intuit, and that helps us situate our observations in relationship to the vast diversity of human life.

This is where Open Knowledge comes in. If participant observation is an inherently democratic method, we need equally democratic ways of accessing the knowledge created by others, and sharing our contributions in turn. Fighting exploitative and profit-oriented practices within academic publishing is particularly important when we consider how much of the knowledge that makes up the anthropological “canon” was stolen from the communities being “studied” in the first place. CUNY students are often descendants of these communities, so forcing students to pay for that same knowledge continues a cycle of colonial and capitalist violence (one of the many reasons we need a free and open CUNY!). Our students’ right to knowledge that is lifegiving to them is deeper than any institution can gate-keep; our job as education and culture workers is simply to facilitate folks’ access to what is already, and has always been, theirs. Just as, moving forward, consensually produced and shared knowledge ought to belong to everybody. 

There is actually an abundance of Open Educational Resources available for anthropological learning. We can get creative about the kinds of materials we draw on, and the kinds of knowledge we consider authoritative, to encourage students to ask how we come to know what we know – and affirm that we are all knowledge makers. 

In our course, we dream about what a city can be with imaginative materials from the folks over at Anthropology for Kids (because we’re all kids at heart!). We access OER textbooks created by fellow teachers and learners on platforms like Manifold and Pressbooks, including developing our visual analysis skills and learning about modes of economic exchange. We analyze public domain archival materials, such as the British colonial People of India photo book, to learn about histories of race and racialization – and we use our imaginations (“How might this person have felt about being photographed? What might she have dreamed about? How could we research to learn more about her life?”) to think about the gaps in the archives. We engage other open-access projects, for example learning about cultural knowledge systems and the violence of colonial epistemicide through the Aztec Codex Mendoza (this links to the platform Curationist, which I also write for!). Finally, we benefit greatly from the efforts of other anthropologists to make their work more accessible – for example, we’re able to learn about gender and sexuality through an Open-Access journal published by the wonderful feminists at Feminist Anthropology.

Our course is centered around students’ fieldnotes – their written observations of daily life – which we examine together in order to derive central anthropological concepts. For example, what does running late for class because we had to care for a relative, and then the train broke down, tell us about reproductive labor and infrastructure? And more importantly, how can the concepts of reproductive labor and infrastructure help us move toward a world where we can all access the caring support, and free public transportation, we need? If the concepts don’t help us meet our needs – we should teach different concepts! 

So, for the Open Knowledge Fellowship final project, I made a CUNY Commons site that can function as a container for collective student-authored ethnography of New York City. If students in subsequent classes are interested, we can continue adding our experiences – if they’re not interested, the site can remain a neat template for other folks looking to facilitate collective ethnography, adaptable to their local context. 

This last part – about the site only truly coming to life if students wish to engage with it – is, to me, key to OER. The process is what is important; ‘openness’ is about getting rid of cost and copyright barriers, but it is first and foremost about creating spaces where we can open our minds and hearts, and really hear each other. The project only works if it works for a particular group of learners – like any collective project – and that’s okay!

Something else I am thinking about is that another part of openness is being real with students, especially about the fact that we, the “teachers,” do not have all the answers (or really…any of “the answers”). Which is just fine – because education is for all of us, together. So here is the question I wake up with everyday and pray to understand: What could learning feel like if we let go of coercion and punishment and the hoarding of resources (financial, intellectual…) and made a commitment, first and foremost, to one another? I don’t know – but CUNY students, and all our brilliant and precious communities in New York City, teach me.

This piece is part of a series by participants in the Winter 2026 Open Knowledge Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Mikaela Elliott is a doctoral student in Developmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on developing inclusive psychometric assessments that integrate emerging technologies to better represent individuals with developmental disabilities and other historically underrepresented groups. In her teaching, she emphasizes research literacy and the real-world implications of developmental science.

I decided to join the OER Fellowship while preparing to teach Child Development for the first time. I was looking at the cost of the instructor edition of the recommended textbook, and even with renting options and discounts, it was hard to swallow. That textbooks were expensive wasn’t news, but it was still demoralizing;I definitely couldn’t imagine asking students to cover that cost.

For many students, the first task of the new semester is not reading, it’s figuring out how to afford the textbook. The average psychology textbook costs between $100 and $150; in some cases, it is closer to $400. That is not incidental spending in the slightest. In a typical three-credit course, students spend roughly 40–60 hours engaging with the textbook across a semester. At $120, that translates to approximately $2 to $3 per hour, just for access to the material. To put it another way, it’s like paying to unlock a news article behind a paywall each time they open the textbook —something many of us balk at on principle. We pause. We ask: Is it worth it?

Yet, semester after semester, we ask students to make that financial commitment for a textbook or resource they might never use again after the final exam.

Personally, I’d hesitate to spend $100 on something I might enjoy but could easily drop after a few months. So why do we expect students to take that same risk for a required textbook, especially when their participation and success in the course depend on it?

The Open Knowledge Fellowship gave me a way to tackle the cost barrier. Before joining the Fellowship, I thought “open” just meant “free.” I wasn’t aware of the differences between openly accessible, openly licensed, and publicly available materials. The Fellowship helped me understand these distinctions and how to spot them. I learned how to read Creative Commons licenses, figure out if a resource can be revised or remixed, and how to give proper credit when adapting materials. I also picked up strategies for finding high-quality open materials for many psychology courses. Now, I go beyond simple web searches and use repositories, library databases, and subject-specific OER hubs.

At first, I was hesitant to use OERs and unsure about potential boundaries to access.. I worried whether all the free materials I shared with students were allowed under copyright law, or if I had accidentally made a mistake. Through our sessions in the fellowship, I learned what constitutes copyrighted, fair use, open-access, and openly licensed materials. Instead of uploading resources and hoping they fell under fair use, I now intentionally select resources that are safe and beneficial to share. After the Open Knowledge Fellowship, I feel much more comfortable choosing the materials to include in my courses.

Arguably, the most important lesson I learned is that Open Knowledge isn’t just about copying materials; it is about contributing to the world of Open Educational Resources, which will, in turn, benefit us all as educators and students alike. When I adapt a text, reorganize chapters, or build assignments around OER, I contribute to a shared pool of teaching materials that others can build on. And because my course site is openly accessible, those adaptations can circulate beyond my own classroom. 

Using OERs brings real and far-reaching benefits to one’s pedagogical practice. When research is openly available, it can be used in classrooms, accessed by practitioners, and read beyond paywalls. Open scholarship broadens who can engage with academic knowledge — and that benefits everyone! It strengthens public trust in higher education and ensures that the knowledge produced at CUNY remains accessible to the communities that make up the institution.

Overall, I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have taken part in this fellowship and would highly recommend it to any instructor!