Arinn Amer           Angélique Aristondo Austin Bailey Sara Cordon Hornillos Salvador Gómez Barranco Phillip Johnson Dario Marcucci Teresa Ober Rosa Squillacote Almudena Vidorreta John Winters

Arinn Amer

As the Thomas Hunter Honors Program Fellow for 2018-2019, I worked closely with students on everything from term papers to professional applications. In addition to providing one-on-one tutoring, I assessed writing samples provided by incoming students to the program to determine how they might benefit from collaboration with the WAC Fellow, and coordinated follow up appointments to discuss that diagnostic work. I also visited classrooms and corresponded with faculty to publicize my services and better integrate them into course curricula, and contributed to a program-wide assessment of writing related learning objectives. It was a deeply enriching privilege to get to know the undergraduate scholars of THHP this year and help grow their awareness of and confidence in their writing as I worked on my own dissertation, a cultural history of tarring and feathering in early America.

Angélique Aristondo

In my role as the WAC Fellow for French courses in the Romance Languages Department at Hunter, I consulted with the faculty and students of the department. I held weekly office hours during which I met with students ranging from those in introductory courses to those majoring in French. I helped organize a workshop and individual tutoring sessions on reading strategies, paper organization, and wise uses of digital tools.

I animated a session of a content-based Professional Development Workshop organized by the Department of Romance Languages in Fall 2018. I also developed lesson-plans fostering writing skills. Besides these Hunter-based services, I organized a workshop developing these teaching strategies at the Graduate Center in April 2019. These are available on the website I co-created and designed, Language Pedagogy @CUNY.

Austin Bailey

Austin Bailey is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He earned his MA in English at Hunter College where he teaches courses in American Literature. His dissertation, Radical Empiricism Before William James, argues that four major nineteenth century American authors—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—transform rather than abandon empiricist philosophy by extending the limits found in its classical iterations. He has published peer-reviewed articles in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture and The Pluralist. As a WAC Fellow, Austin focused on promoting the integration of WAC pedagogy within English major courses. To this end, he partnered with Professor Jeff Allred to develop a blogsite for a departmental project called Undergraduate Studies, a collaborative web-based project that offers beginning literature instructors access to syllabi, writing prompts, and other course construction tools through the CUNY Commons. In his final semester, Austin gave talks to ACERT and the English department on ungrading the literature and composition classroom. Aside from being a WAC Fellow, one of Austin’s most formative pedagogical experiences came from serving as a peer tutor during his undergraduate years at Hunter College’s Rockowitz Writing Center.

Sara Cordon Hornillos

Sara Cordón is currently a Ph. D. candidate at the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures department at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research critically examines the changes that are taking place in consumer habits and the forms of creation and legitimation of Spanish-language literature in XXI century. She received her MFA in Creative Writing at NYU, her M.A. in Humanities at Carlos III University of Madrid and her M.A. in Book Publishing at Salamanca University. She is the author of the novel “Para español, pulse 2” (Caballo de Troya/ Penguin Random House, 2018). She co-founded the bilingual New York based publishing company Chatos Inhumanos.

As a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow at Hunter College, she attended weekly meetings with the WAC Coordinators and Fellows. She also taught the workshop “Citation and bibliography in MLA format,” organized and coordinated a student’s conference, and provided weekly Spanish writing tutoring hours for students with writing assignments, papers, or compositions.

Salvador Gómez Barranco

Salvador Gómez Barranco is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures doctoral program, at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His dissertation approaches the study of autobiographical novels and films in the context of the Spanish 2008 Crisis, using the findings of contemporary theories on affect and vulnerability. He received a B.A. (Licenciatura) in Journalism and an M.F.A. in Literary Creation at the University of Seville, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU. In his articles and conference presentations, he has explored a wide range of topics, such as gender and sexuality, Spanish film and literature, Spanish intellectualism, etc.

As a WAC Fellow at Hunter College (2018/2019), Salvador was focused on offering tutoring hours in academic writing in Spanish for the Romance Languages Department’s students. He attended a weekly WAC fellows meeting, led by Prof. Paoli and Prof. Smoke, as well as the sessions at Hostos Community College. He also designed the workshop “How to make an oral presentation. Strategies for written support.”

Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. He studies organized crime and violence in Latin America, and the wars on terror and drugs in the U.S. At Hunter, he teaches courses on terrorism, Latin American politics, and U.S. government. His dissertation project looks at the communication and public relations practices of organized crime in Mexico, and the effects of these on the public sphere. So far, he has spent 9 months conducting research in several Mexican cities.

As a WAC Fellow, Philip worked with the Academic Center for Excellence in Research and Teaching (ACERT) and the Hunter College AANAPISI Project (HCAP).

Dario Marcucci

I served as a WAC Fellow for the Italian Program in the Department of Romance Languages. My duties included offering workshops and writing tutoring for students enrolled in advanced Italian courses.

I am a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center. My dissertation explores the representation of landscape in WWI literature; my main interests include war literature, modernism, and film studies.

Teresa Ober

During the Fall 2018 and Spring 2019 semesters, I served as a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Fellow at Hunter College of the City University of New York. I worked with a faculty supervisor in the Psychology Department, where I consulted with faculty, teaching assistants, and students of PSYCH 250: Experimental Psychology: General. Given that the course, which is required for students intending to major in Psychology, is writing-intensive, there were many challenges and opportunities for student learning. In an effort to address several of these challenges, I sought to focus on factors associated with assessment and feedback. During the Fall semester, I conducted workshops with students on the use of peer-review via a digital pedagogical tool to support writing instruction in the social sciences. In preparation for the workshops, I met with faculty to gauge some of the challenges they’ve experienced in providing timely feedback to students in the course. In the Spring semester, we conducted a workshop for instructors and teaching assistants of PSYCH 250.The workshop was designed for attendees to: (1) discuss the use of rubrics to assess student writing; (2) learn about some of the issues and challenges instructors/graders face in assessing student writing; and (3) norm sections of the revised rubric. All instructors and teaching assistants were invited to attend, as well as those of other writing-intensive Psychology courses. The discussion that emerged during the workshop was quite useful for informing revisions to the rubric. The intent of these initiatives was to support writing instruction by (1) testing whether peer-review may be a viable opportunity for students to improve their writing, and (2) developing a rubric to comprehensively evaluate student work and promote students’ understanding of specific ways to develop their writing. I believe we made some progress towards these goals.

Working with the course instructors, students, and my WAC supervisor, Dr. Martin, has been an enjoyable learning experience for me. The peer-review workshops went well and the meetings to discuss the redesign of the rubric were productive. The rubric is something that I will likely continue to use in subsequent Psychology courses that are writing intensive that I teach, and the experience has made me more cognizant of assessment practices in writing.

Rosa Squillacote

My dissertation addresses the relationship between racial diversity within the NYPD and department policy. My dissertation seeks to answer the question of why the NYPD - a racially diverse department - continues to engage in racially biased practices (such as marijuana arrests, which disproportionately target Black people, and individual misconduct such as the 2014 killing of Eric Garner).

Over the course of the year I worked with students on papers assigned for courses. All of those papers required original arguments addressing course material. Sessions working with students one on one - many of whom came back for repeated sessions -- allowed me to put into practice the WAC training. When students came in with questions about mechanics, we would go back to their original assignment and work instead on clarifying their understanding of the material and their argument. In some cases I was able to work with students over multiple sessions to provide tiered support, beginning with developing an argument, structuring the argument, then looking at mechanics.

The weekly WAC meetings were invaluable in developing my pedagogical approach to teaching. Speaking with other Fellows and the assigned readings allowed me to consider other approaches to challenges like dealing with different levels of students’ abilities regarding writing and reading comprehension; developing assignments; theories about grading, etc. Discussing our own academic work was also materially useful. I was able to present my dissertation research and incorporated many suggestions from my peers.

Almudena Vidoretta

I am a PhD candidate in the Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. As a scholar, my current research focuses on contemporary re-readings of Teresa de Jesús by Latin American women writers.

During the academic year 2018-2019, I was a Writing Across the Curriculum Fellow in the Romance Languages Department at Hunter College, where I also worked mentoring the Romance Languages Fellows. Acting as a WAC Fellows Coordinator, I designed specific guidelines to improve the Writing Tutoring. I coordinated a series of workshops on methodological topics such as writing a research paper, quotation and written support for oral presentations, offered both in Spanish and French. My colleagues and I organized a Conference for CUNY Students of Spanish, Italian and French. I have been also working individually in support of the Spanish Concentration in Translation and Interpretation. I contributed to the development of innovative pedagogies, designing written activities and materials, as well as researching New York non-profit organizations for future collaborations, translation internships, and community-based learning.

John Winters

As the WAC Fellow for Hunter College's History department, John led in-class writing workshops for students and helped a range of students from undergraduate to graduate writers in one-on-one meetings. We discussed thesis development, organization, research method, evidence usage, formatting based on the Chicago Manual of Style, and the general principles of historical writing.

Outside Hunter, John is a doctoral candidate in History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He has curated and researched for exhibits at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College and the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, and his doctoral research has been supported by the New-York Historical Society, the Colonial Dames of America, the CUNY Early Research Initiative, and the Graduate Center. His dissertation (degree expected 2020) is a multi-generational memory study and biography of four Seneca men and women titled “The Amazing Iroquois” in Myth and Memory, 1776-1955.