Syllabus for the dictation section of Sight Singing & Dictation 1. This class was taught virtually and synchronously.

The main goal of this Environmental Science 99 Laboratory course is for you to think about how we interact with the environment, our impacts and the results of these, not just in our immediate vicinity but globally. We will focus on three main topics; sustainability, pollution and climate change.

An additional goal is to gain knowledge of the fundamental scientific basis of major environmental issues facing society, including climate change, air, soil and water quality, food production for a growing population, sustainable energy resources and biodiversity. We also consider these problems in the context of the current social, economic, & political environment. In addition to discussing these environmental challenges, we will address potential solutions and management practices that have been or could be implemented to mitigate the negative impacts of the current environmental issues facing our neighborhoods, cities, countries and planet.

Everyone eats. In this sense, the experience of food is common to us all. Yet the meanings we attach to food—as individuals with complex personal histories and needs, as members of particular cultures, communities, and belief systems—are remarkably diverse and powerful. In this course, we engage works by scholars, poets, and other writers to explore the significance of food as the source of inspiration and debate. This exploration will serve as a basis for our own writing. Our written responses will explore food as it relates to identity, social justice, and the environment—showing how far inquiry into one topic can stretch.

Course: ENG 110: Food as Philosophy, System, Controversy
Instructor: Nicole Cote
This project was first developed during the Open Pedagogy Fellowship (Winter 2021), through the Mina Rees Library at The Graduate Center.

Read more about this project: Cultivating Resources for the Future by Nicole Cote
https://gclibrary.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2021/04/22/cultivating-resources-for-the-future/

In this course you get the opportunity to research a gentrifying neighborhood in NYC and develop a mini case study that examines housing and urban restructuring through a critical lens. Drawing on various methods (including field observations), weekly assignments, and discussions with your peers; you’ll build toward completing your case study over the 6-week period. During this time you will also learn:

how gentrification impacts affordable housing
why gentrification is a form of racial capitalism
what forms of local resistance exist
theories that attempt to explain how gentrification operates, and
methods for studying urban space

A collection of nine blog prompts developed for an introductory music course that incorporates world music, popular music, and Western art music through a topical (rather than chronological) organization. Each prompt asks students to synthesize course content or apply course concepts to music apart from their assigned listening. Full credit is earned if the student: writes around 200 words; uses musical and/or textual evidence to back up their observations; and leaves a substantive comment (2-3 sentences) on a classmate’s blog. These blog prompts reference passages and assigned listening from Cornelius and Natvig, Music: A Social Experience (2nd ed).

A small group activity in which students interpret an example of Renaissance dance notation: “The Washerwoman’s Branle,” taken from Thoinot Arbeau’s 1589 book Orchesography. Students are tasked with figuring out what information is communicated by each column, imagining how one might use the example to learn this dance, and considering the strengths and weaknesses of the notation method. This worksheet includes space to summarize the group discussion and an image of the dance notation divided by rectangles.

Six different definitions of music are included on this handout. In small groups, students read the definitions and discuss the following prompts included on the handout: What definition makes the most sense to you? Why do you think other people would disagree with your chosen definition? What’s one definition you don’t like? Best suited to the first week of classes, can also be used in courses like Music Fundamentals or World Music.

An icebreaker activity for the first day of class. Instructor introduces the idea of the “Three Bs” in classical music, before introducing the “Three Bs” of current popular music (this instructor chose Beyonce, Bad Bunny, and BTS). Students choose their favorite “B” and pair up with others who made the same choice. Other grouping prompts can easily be substituted here, like favorite genre of music. Students then take turns interviewing each other, asking two questions and summarizing their partner’s answers in writing. At the end, groups can share their answers with the clas and the instructor can type them out on the Powerpoint.

A definition-focused worksheet about the musical elements based on vocabulary from the textbook Music: A Social Experience, 2nd ed. by Steven Cornelius and Mary Natvig. This assignment can be easily reworked to match an alternative textbook.

The Music and… Playlist is a semester-long scaffolded writing assignment that I designed to replace a midterm and final exam. (Scaffolding refers to breaking a larger writing assignment into step-by-step, cumulative stages.) This assignment requires students to: choose a social topic (e.g. coming of age, feminism, holidays); write a topic proposal describing how their topic relates to music; choose six pieces of music from different genres; write short playlist entries that discuss the social and musical characteristics of each piece; and create a slide presentation summary. The document below includes handouts for each stage of the assignment.

Peer review pair activity intended for early stage of the writing process. Students ask each other questions about their project and record the answers, allowing them to explore and articulate the ideas that will eventually be included in their paper. After finishing the interviews on pages 1 and 2, students write down helpful suggestions for their partner on page 3. The questions in this activity can easily be changed to fit other writing assignments like a concert report or research paper.

In-class activity for small groups of 3-4 students; intended to review the musical characteristics associated with four genres of sacred music: plainchant; organum; Renaissance mass; chorale. In the first phase, groups are asked to fill out a table with the musical characteristics of each genre while looking over their notes and textbook. In the second phase, groups are given online access to four anonymous musical examples (one for each genre). While listening and discussing at their own pace, groups should identify the genre for each example and give two reasons behind their choice. The format of this activity can be easily repurposed to fit other musical genres, periods, or styles.

Online and in-person. Organized by social topics rather than chronology; incorporates world music and popular music alongside Western art music. Assignments include blogs, online quizzes, and a semester-long scaffolded writing project to replace midterm and final exams. Textbook: Stephen Cornelius and Mary Natvig, Music: A Social Experience, 2nd. ed.

In-person, non-major introduction to music featuring quizzes in combination with a midterm presentation and final project. Assigned textbook: Esther M. Morgan-Ellis’ Resonances: Engaging Music in its Cultural Context.

This text can be used for Math 241 (Introduction to Probability and Mathematical Statistics) at Queens College. Topics include the axioms of probability, counting, conditional probabilities, random variables, and an introduction to statistics.

This toolkit is designed to help you teach English 110 students at Queens College how to use library resources to research effectively. It is part of an ongoing, iterative effort, in collaboration with the English 110 coordinators, to create flexible materials that can be adapted to suit the specific needs of a variety of English 110 classes. It continues to be a work in progress. These materials are developed to provide templates for action and activity at various points throughout the library instruction sequence, as outlined below.

COURSE GOALS

Develop an appreciation for literature and its analysis as part of encountering and understanding the world and its regions in a cultural and historical context;
Develop close reading skills to interpret literary texts across different genres;
Develop familiarity with some conventional disciplinary language and its use to think about how texts work (for example, assessing literary works in terms of voice, tone, and structure);
Understand how context works with ideas to produce the meaning of a text;
Use both informal and formal writing as opportunities to discover one’s own ideas in conversation with the ideas of others;
Write a thoughtful, analytical and coherent essay that is firmly grounded in the text and adheres to MLA guidelines.

In this class we will examine a constellation of British “realist” novels that are set in fictional county towns in England. Fictional towns such as Coketown and Mudfog in Dickens’ work (based on Preston in Lancashire), Wessex in Thomas Hardy’s (said to include Dorset, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Berkshire among others), Raveloe and Middlemarch in George Eliot’s (speculated to be based on Coventry in Warwickshire), Barchester in Trollope’s (said to be based on a combination of Winchester and Exeter).

The course studies the topographical imagination in these realist novels. It asks: What does the decision to rename a place that is adjacent to an actual place do for the symbolic construction of that reality? How do these fictional spaces explore the heterogeneities of the periphery as distinct from (and similar to) the popular metropolitan characterizations of the peripheries? How do they attend to the specific vernacular language-scapes of these regions? How does the chronotope of these regionally-specific novels explore the working conditions and social life in smaller industrial and semi-rural parts of England?

In this course, we will treat fictional spatial geography as an essential part of time, narrative and plot-construction of the realist novel. Studying theories of the novel such as Bakhtin’s “chronotope” and Paul Ricoeur’s “threefold mimesis” we see how the fictional naming of spaces provides the opportunity for salience, symbolism and specificity in realist novels. Realism, therefore, is not an exercise in inventorying reality, but imaginatively constructing it (what Barthes, noting the lack of novelistic cohesion in Flaubert, calls the “reality effect” in his 1989 essay of the same title). The fictionalization of actual spaces allows the reader to avoid easy identifications or preconceptions and instead “come into” the constructed world of realist narrative. It is in this manner that the realist novel inscribes within itself the seemingly opposite paradigm of escapism and representation. Keeping in mind this dialectic between the imagined and the real, we will explore the multiple realisms that emerge from the deliberately selected sample size of Victorian realist novels included in this course, and how their regional and fictional vantage point allows them to respond to the modernizing epoch of the Victorian era and the crises that lie therein.