Being in Brooklyn is a collaboration of two courses, Prof. Justin Davis’s Effective Speaking and Prof. Jody R. Rosen’s English Composition, as part of the First-Year Learning Communities program. It will be taught in the Fall 2013 semester, but draws from previous Learning Community collaborations entitled “Telling Brooklyn Stories,” from Fall 2011 and Fall 2012. This learning community considers Brooklyn, communication, and location as topics for study.

Brooklyn is a collection of neighborhoods and location, a microcosm of the world. This semester our Being in Brooklyn Learning Community will explore Brooklyn through archives at the Brooklyn Historical Society and library research, integrating our own experiences in the City Tech vicinity. Our goal is to communicate effectively, through reading and writing and listening and speaking, what it means to exist in Brooklyn. We will use a variety of approaches including spoken and written assignments that employ interactive technologies including City Tech’s OpenLab digital platform as well as YouTube and Google Maps. These assignments will create a digital archive of life in Brooklyn that will be available to explore in the future.

This Learning Community will provide students with a foundation in effective spoken and written communication. By exploring the relationship between place and identity, this first-year experience encourages students to locate themselves both within our Learning Community as well as the larger City Tech community.