Introduction: Megan Behrent

Hi all,

I have been teaching at City Tech since Fall 2014. Before that, I taught at Franklin D. Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn for 15 years. FDR H.S. is a 3000-4000 person comprehensive public high school that serves a large population of emergent bilinguals with students from 70 countries and 37 language groups. Most of our students attended CUNY schools after graduation, so the City Tech student body feels familiar to me. I also taught night classes at Touro College in East New York, and during my very early years as a graduate student, I taught in the writing program at Stony Brook University. My work as a teacher also led me into the world of teacher activism, as well as writing about issues related to teaching, pedagogy, and education policy.

As a reader and a writer, I have broad, interdisciplinary interests, in part due to my experience as a teacher and activist. In addition to writing about education and pedagogy, I write about literature and social movements and the intersection between race, gender, sexuality and class in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature. My current book project is an intellectual history of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich with a focus on their friendship and their political contributions and legacies. That they met as instructors in the SEEK Program at City College in the era of Open Admissions was part of the spark for the initial research that inspired the project.

Particularly important to me as a writer is the collaborative process of working with my writing group—a group of women from CUNY that began under the auspices of the Faculty Fellowship Publication Program (FFPP). We have been invited to share our experience in several venues and continue to work, write and learn together.

Pictured below are my teaching and editorial assistants: Ella and Meowie. They interrupt zoom events frequently, but are a model of collaboration despite serious differences in learning and communication styles.

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