“Engaging Post-1965 Queens”

Jason Tougaw

On Monday I attended the first seminar hosted by QC’s new Asian American Pacific Islander Community Studies Program (AAPICS). Titled “Engaging Post-1965 Queens: Teaching and Curriculum-Building for Culturally Diverse Communities,” it provided an incredible opportunity for students and faculty to come together and share ideas about the growing diversity of classrooms. The keynote speaker, Ms. Susie Tanenbaum, who is a QC alumni and the current Community and Culture Coordinator at the Queens Borough President’s Office, started off the discussion by remarking on the various changes she has witnessed in Queens. In addition to describing the unique quality of her work and her personal engagement with culturally diverse communities,  Ms. Tanenbaum made several suggestions for new courses at Queens College. I thought that the ideas she raised were really interesting and would be a great means for students to bridge the material they learn in class with the communities they live in. For instance, Ms. Tanenbaum proposed a course dedicated to oral histories or mental maps, where students would be encouraged to interview both “old” and “new” immigrants about their experiences and visions of Queens and the City as a whole. The final project she described for this class, which would be a visual exhibit and/or sound archive, is very intriguing and can definitely help inform students about both their communities and current diversity issues. Another proposal Ms. Tanenbaum suggested was a course on Queens & Film, which would involve examining movies filmed in the borough as well as the creation of a 1/2-hour video based on an original, student-orchestrated script, to be aired on campus.

But while these suggestions for new courses are fascinating, I just wanted to tell everyone that a number of new classes have already been established and will be offered in Fall 2010 as part of AAPICS’ endeavor to create an Asian American Studies minor at QC. Here are some examples:

  • Chinese Calligraphy: A New Paradigm for Dance Theater Choreography (Prof. Yin Mei Critchell, Drama, Theatre & Dance Dept.)
  • Living the Community/ Writing the Community (Prof. Akhtar Khan, English Dept.)
  • Voices of New York (Prof. Miki Makihara & Prof. Michael Newman, Anthropology Dept. & Linguistics and Communication Disorders Dept.)
  • Planning the Future of Downtown Flushing (Prof. Tarry Hum, Urban Studies Dept.)
  • Oral History and Domestic Work in NYC (Prof. Premilla Nadasen, History Dept.)
  • Healthy Dietary Practices in Traditional Northeast Asian Cuisine (Prof. Sungeun Choi, Family, Nutrition & Exercise Sciences Dept.)

For more information about other courses that will be available next semester, feel free to contact me or the Asian American Studies Center. I think that all of these new classes sound amazing and just listening to the great discussions during the seminar made me almost sad to be graduating this spring… But at least the changes being implemented by AAPICS show how Queens College is taking steps towards re-building course curriculums to suit the environment of today’s culturally diverse communities.