Big Heart Cookbook: Activities to Build Belonging is a growing open educational resource (OER) showcasing engaging classroom activities âsourced from City Tech Facultyâ that build belonging, connection, and community in and beyond the classroom.
This faculty-focused collection offers fun, reflective exercises designed to help students decompress, focus, and engage more meaningfully with each other and the course material. Like a community cookbook, educators can browse and adapt activities to suit any classroom, regardless of discipline or teaching modality.
Grounded in Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Paulo Freireâs problem-posing model of education, and other student-centered pedagogies, this collection challenges the traditional âbankingâ model of higher educationâin which the professor deposits knowledge and the student passively receives it. Instead, these activities are chosen and lightly edited to support learner agency, voice, and collaboration.
When students feel a sense of connection and care in the classroom, theyâre more likely to engage deeplyâwith each other, with the material, and with their own learning. Big Heart Cookbook invites educators to experiment, adapt, and share recipes for building more connected and compassionate classrooms.
This collection is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license. The work is freely available for others to share, reuse, or adapt, provided proper attribution is given, it is not used for commercial purposes, and derivative works are shared under the same license.
Sources
- Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Classics, (1970) 2017.
- CAST (2024). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 3.0. Retrieved from https://udlguidelines.cast.org
