Thanks to support from the Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the 2026 Summer Archives and Open Knowledge Faculty Fellowship is supporting 4 full-time teaching faculty members to expand the use Wikimedia platforms at CUNY in the Fall 2026 semester. Participants will produce either public programming, or openly licensed lesson plans that use CUNY archival collections and integrate Wikimedia platforms. Read more about the participants below.
Tanvir Prince – Hostos College
“My project is a simple quantitative reasoning assignment. It uses Wikimedia platforms, especially Wikipedia and Wikidata. Students will work with real public data. They will create a small table, make a simple graph, and write a short explanation of what the data shows. The materials will be simple and reusable so other instructors can adapt them for their own courses.”
Kristen Hodnett – Hunter College
“This project integrates Wikimedia platforms into SPED 75900, a Writing and Curriculum course for teachers and teacher candidates in special education, reframing Wikipedia from a discouraged source into a tool for critical engagement and authentic contribution in P12 classrooms. Students move from reorientation to participation, first exploring Wikipedia and related tools as learners, then considering their instructional applications, and ultimately developing lesson plans to use in their classrooms with P12 learners. The project is scaffolded through a phased approach, using orientation of Wikimedia platforms, integration of these tools as part of their own learning, and application of these tools in P12 classrooms. As a culminating task, students design lesson plans for P–12 classrooms using Wikitools, evaluated through a co-created rubric that emphasizes gradual release, digital literacy, ethical engagement, and knowledge production in open platforms.”
Francine Almash – City College of New York
“‘Finding Fred Francis’ is an archival research and open pedagogy project recovering the largely undocumented history of disability activism at CUNY, centering the story of Fred Francis and the broader student disability rights movement of the 1970s–90s. The project uses the concept of archival silence—what archives exclude as much as what they contain—to develop freely replicable lesson plans and public programming that connect CUNY’s disability history to the wider struggle for educational equity.”
Michael Mandiberg – CUNY Graduate Center
“I will be using the CUNY Graduate Center’s archive of Dissertations & Theses, Wikidata and the Wikimedia Commons in my Fall 2026 course in the Graduate Center’s MS in Data Analysis and Visualization program. For the text analysis module, we will create a topic model describing the 12,000 dissertations and theses created at the GC. Working with the GC Dissertation Archive connects students to the intellectual history of their own institution and invites them to see a collection they will personally contribute to as a structured, analyzable dataset, which bridges historiography and data practice. Additionally, we will use Wikidata and the Commons as the source for the data clustering and computer vision modules.”
These four scholars are part of a larger cohort connected with the Cultivating Archives & Institutional Memory project, funded by the Mellon Foundation. Learn more about the entire cohort of Archives & Open Knowledge Faculty Fellows here.
