Macaulay Honors College Seminar 4 | Professor Robin Rogers
Hi! I'm Lindsey (she / her / hers), a Teaching and Learning Collaboratory Fellow at Macaulay Central. I'm a doctoral candidate in English (specializing in Rhetoric and Composition) at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and I also work as a Writing Center Consultant at the Columbia School of Social Work. I used to teach writing at John Jay College, and I also worked in the Center for Teaching and Learning at Baruch.
CUNY Law School’s Center for Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR) has created pamphlets on how to respond to authorities if stopped here in New York or during travel. They have produced these informative brochures (linked here) in:
English
Spanish
Arabic
Bengali
Urdu
CLEAR also provides free legal assistance. Please pass these on to members of our community as you see fit.
“Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer” is a video about the proper and the best way to interview people. A lot of the strategies that are presented in the video is also suggested in Telling True Stories, A Nonfiction by Mark Kramer. Like many experienced journalists have pointed out, it is important to make the interviewee to feel comfort. Either the interview must be outside or in a kitchen, it is necessary to let the interviewee feel no pressure. The opening of “Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer” shows that not many people are comfortable talking to a stranger on the streets. Many people just ignore the interviewer or reject the invitation. When the interviewee once feel comfortable, the interviewer can start to ask basic questions to warm up. one of the experts has noted that you want to connect with the interviewee so he or she can open up to you. The questions can be easy question, but the ultimate goal is to allow the interviewee to tell the interviewer a story relating to the subject. It is crucial to stay focus and interested as an interviewer so the interviewee can feel the need to tell something more. However, it is not good to overreact to certain story because it might scare the interviewee and eventually lose the connection between interviewee and the interviewer. The expert also has said that it is good to see the interviewee more emotionally because it is a sign that they are trusting you and telling you everything they know.
Harvard Political Review on the other hand is a different type of interview. The setting is intimating because it is in a conference room of Institute of Politics at Harvard College. The interviewer introduced herself or himself and jumped straight into the questions. The body language of the interviewees often to be very stiffen at the beginning of the interviews. The questions allow the interviewees to tell stories, but the questions are very specific. This type of interviews is what I have often watched on television or internet. The format is very rigid and intense to watch. The audience does not feel like connecting with the interviewee, but rather like a short session to know about the interviewee. The audience will not learn much about the life and the motive of the interviewee, but more on the topic of subject.
Here are some pointers on adding a Google Doc to the shared Google Drive when you need to turn in the draft of your Issues of New York posts.
1. Access the Shared Drive link from the invitation e-mail that I sent to you.
2. When you open the Drive, click on the blue button labeled “NEW”
3. Select “Google Docs” from the list:
4. Select “OK” when you’re prompted about creating a doc in the shared folder:
5. Once you’ve created a doc, copy and paste (or just write) your Issues of New York post(s) into it. Make sure to title the doc with your first name and last initial in the top left-hand corner:
Please note that anything you put in the Google Drive folder will be accessible and editable by your classmates.
Here’s a guide on posting to the course site (your Issues of New York posts).
1. Log in to the ePortfolio system here.
2. Once you’ve logged in, hover your mouse over the menu item that says the name of the course page, and then click “Dashboard”:
3. Once you’re on the back end of the site, go to Posts –> Add New:
4. Important: Don’t forget to select “Issues of New York Profiles” when you’ve finished writing your post! Otherwise, your post won’t show up on the correct page:
Pro Tip: It’s a good idea to write your post in a Word document and to copy / paste it into the blog, because sometimes WordPress doesn’t save drafts. If you do this, you might have weird formatting issues. To resolve those, do the following, but note that if your post has hyperlinks in it, this will deactivate them:
5. Go to Edit –> Select all 
6. Once your text is selected, click the “Clear Formatting” eraser on the text editor menu:
7. You’re ready to submit your post! You can push the green “Publish” button on the right-hand side of the page:
Dear Students,
Welcome to the spring semester!
My name is Robin Rogers, and I’ll be your professor for Seminar 4: Shaping the Future of New York City. Lindsey Albracht will be the Instructional Technology Fellow for the course this semester, and she’ll also be helping out with some of our writing workshops. We’re both looking forward to meeting you on January 30th.
Seminar 4, your final MHC seminar, will examine the ongoing interplay of social, economic, and political forces that shape the physical forms and social dynamics of New York City. In the class, we’ll address the major events and study the institutional agents of change in the city, and come to understand the roles people take or are given in the process of government and the ways in which these roles are affected by patterns of inequality and power.
A couple of logistical details:
We’ll see you on the 30th! We hope you enjoy the rest of your break.
Sincerely,
Professor Rogers and Lindsey
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