Puerto Rican and Latino Studies Course Design

During summer of 2022 before I began at Brooklyn College as Assistant Professor in the Puerto Rican and Latino Studies Department, I connected with Prof. Beth Evans, the PRLS library liaison, and Colin McDonald, Open Educational Resource (OER) Developer. I had received sample syllabi from Puerto Rican and Latino Studies for my courses and I knew I wanted to develop them into OER courses. I had over a decade of experience teaching at the college level, and as a CUNY graduate, I knew I wanted to create an experience for students to process information in multimodal ways. All course syllabi had hyperlinks where students could access multimodal texts and the texts available on our Brooklyn College library site. This made the OER process/transition much easier.

Puerto Rican and latino studies 1001:

introduction to puerto rican and latino studies

For PRLS 1001, I began with the poets who are speaking to the experiences of Latinxs in the United States, and weaved through poems across the sessions on the syllabus. I included spoken word (“Hair” by Elizabeth Acevedo) and paired poems with interviews for students to get a deeper understanding of complex topics (Alan Pelaez Lopez and Ariana Brown on anti- Blackness in the Latinx community). You can watch, listen, and read the poems by following the links on the syllabus. Click here for the presentation titled, “A Glimpse Into Teaching PRLS 1001,” shared at the Brooklyn College Teaching Portfolio Workshop Series in January 2023 facilitated by Prof. Stephanie Jensen-Moulton.

puerto rican and latino studies 2005: The Puerto Rican, LatinX, and Caribbean Child in New York City

For PRLS 2005, I reached out to teachers in my network, inviting them to visit my class virtually. The arc of the course begins with the voices of Puerto Rican, Latinx, and Caribbean children through anthologies, videos from organizations, and local schools. We then look at research studies done with our communities in New York City. The second part of the course focuses on linguistic diversity, teaching, and family/community connections. Students create graphics with information on a group they select to support local schools with resources. The culminating project includes a paper with a curriculum action plan.