Tag Archives: Learning Communities

reflection on my experience with Brooklyn Historical Society

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On October 15, we went to Brooklyn Historical Society and it gave me a new experience on doing research on map. From different type and different period of the map, I realize the maps can tell us a lot about the history, which we could not find on the reading. Such as the change on Pearl Street; and how a family view their neighborhood in their own family map. From the experiences in this semester, I learn a valuable lesson that things are not the same from different vantage points.  Because people have different point of view, even that was the same place, but we still see them differently by different time period. Such as the map of the 9th Avenue on New Yorker magazine, his view of the world is different from what we see today, because the time and our thought are different with him. Thus, we should learn about the community by ourselves, analyzing the creditable resource and get to know what this community real likes. Brooklyn Historical Society is a great place to study the history, even we have internet, but there still have many material, resource that is not on the website. I think I will go back there when I need to research.

Being in Brooklyn

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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.