In order to enhance my unit on Asian American Migration history in a manner that sets a stronger foundation for our class, students will read an excerpt from books discussing local, NYC Asian American communities and will identify the ways identity, intersectionality, health disparities, and social determinants of health are present in each community profile.
Gina Cherry
Gina the director of BMCC's Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship (CETLS). Before coming to BMCC in 2016, Gina was a founder and co-director of Hunter's Academic Center for Excellence in Research and Teaching, a faculty member at Marymount College, a research scientist at the University of Washington, and a tenant organizer in subsidized housing in San Francisco. Gina holds a Master's in Social Welfare from the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
In my Fundamentals of Communications Technology class, I used two documentary films about media representation to discuss the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of Asians and Asian Americans.
Teaching about media representation
In this project, racially diverse community college students will critically examine and rebuild the syllabus of ART 3100 (Pre-history to Contemporary Art).
Transforming Art 3100 Syllabus: Toward a Racially Responsive Art History
My teaching innovation is inspired and shaped largely by context. Since Hispanic and Black students are the majority at Bronx Community college, and South Asians and Asian Americans comprise only about 4%, I assume (though not take it for granted) that students would not “naturally” gravitate toward an Asian American course in order to learn about their own cultural identity. Instead of building a monolithic course around narrow demographic needs and necessities, I will take an approach advocated by Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak in a speech, “Higher Education in the Subcontinent”. I will focus on “a noncoercive rearrangement of desires” by reminding students that “democracy is not about us, but those unlike us.” By introducing Desi Hip Hop as a cultural formation in contemporary U.S., I would love to, not only make Asian American Studies more relatable to non-white non-Asian students, but also let them imbibe alternative modes of identity refraction. Hip Hop is my course beeswax, but desi Hip Hop is the marrow that would allow a window into cultures of solidarity, resistance, transnationalism that bind diasporas.
Desi Hip Hop: Cultural Appropriation or Transnational Solidarity?
I’m constructing a unit on race as speculative that explains how “Black” and “Asian-American” are both categories created and shaped from colonial & white supremacist ideas.
Race as Speculative (Unit)
Even before opening their mouth, a person of Asian descent in the United States already has to work with many stereotypes and perceptions. Beginning from the idea of “standard English,” what are the politics around Asian Americans and their use of language, whether English and/or heritage? In some ways, language usage becomes an identifier, a way for non-Asians to mark where these “perpetual foreigners” come from, as a way of confirming their existence in this country. We will begin to deconstruct the Englishes of Asian American communities, whether regional accents to Engrish, or that of newly-arrived Asian immigrants. What might be the repercussions, advantages/privileges?
