Open Educational Resources
Document Type
Lesson Plan
Publication Date
Fall 9-11-2026
Abstract
Teaching the Save Hostos Movement offers students a way to examine how a college became a focus of struggles over education, language, and community power. This project brings that history into three workshops across Latin American and Caribbean Studies courses at Hostos Community College. Students begin with the archive. Working with the Hostos Library archivist, they explore materials from the campaign to preserve the college during New York City’s 1970s fiscal crisis, asking who created these records, whom they addressed, and whose experiences remain difficult to recover. They then compare textual and visual sources, tracing how activists made their claims through words and images. A final workshop, supported by the Writing Center, helps students develop public-facing exhibit entries grounded in archival evidence. With their consent, selected entries will appear on CUNY Academic Commons. Students contribute their own interpretations of a struggle that helped make their education at Hostos possible.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Comments
This lesson plan was created as a part of the 2026 Archives and Open Knowledge Faculty Fellowship, funded by the Cultivating Archives and Institutional Memory Project with the aim of integrating CUNY archival materials into classroom instruction and research. The Fellows served as teaching ambassadors for CUNY’s archival collections, spreading interest among other faculty and their students. Through guided work with CUNY history primary sources, students will gain knowledge in the use of historical records in their scholarship.