This piece is part of a series by participants in the Summer 2025 Open Knowledge Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Adam Kocurek is a PhD candidate in History at The Graduate Center. He researches at the intersections of LGBTQ history, history of higher education, and labor history. He has BAs in History and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and an MA in History. He teaches at Hunter College and works as a historic tour guide in New York City.

I was initially drawn to the Open Knowledge Fellowship because of my long-standing commitment to accessible, low-cost education. As an instructor at Hunter College, I transitioned years ago to using The American Yawp, an open-source textbook, in my Modern U.S. History survey course. While Yawp offers a solid foundation, I found it lacking in depth and breadth and often felt the need to supplement it heavily through my lectures. I had long wanted to integrate a wider range of primary and secondary sources into my course—but doing so without increasing costs for my students, and while ensuring long-term accessibility and freedom from copyright restrictions, was a significant challenge.

Before this fellowship, I had limited knowledge of how to locate high-quality open-access materials, assess their licensing permissions, or distribute them effectively to students on platforms they could access after the Brightspace course page or their institutional affiliation ends. This fellowship gave me the time, tools, and support to rethink my course as a resource-rich, open-access learning experience—one that I am excited to pilot this coming Fall semester.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Seventh Regiment Armory, New York” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed June 14, 2025. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/cdf5c910-c55b-012f-de61-58d385a7bc34

In my Modern U.S. History course at Hunter, I emphasize New York City as a recurring entity in both lecture and discussion. This is rooted in my belief in the value of public and local history — and in the frequent, painful realization that many of my CUNY students know surprisingly little about the city in which we all live and work. NYC also serves as an ideal case study for many of the national political, cultural, and social movements that we cover in class, making abstract themes more tangible. For instance, when we discuss the intersections of art, protest, and state power, I point out the 7th Regiment Armory visible from our classroom in the Hunter College West Building. From there, we explore events like the Astor Place Riots, the suppression of labor strikes, and the role of the 7th Regiment in the Civil War and World War I. For my pedagogical purposes, the city serves as a conducive way to explore broader historical themes with my students; while they may have limited knowledge or experience with the rest of the country, all of them know NYC.

Building on this pedagogical approach, I used the fellowship to seek out open-access materials that enrich both my U.S. history curriculum and my focus on NYC. While I was already familiar with a few resources — such as OldNYC.org or local institutions like the NYC Municipal Archives and the New York Historical Society — I found that many materials were either not open-source or not easily accessible to students. Working closely with library staff, I discovered a number of remarkable open-access primary and secondary sources that I plan to integrate into my teaching. Most of the books, book chapters, and journal articles that I located were found via JSTOR Open-Access and DOAJ – resources I discovered through the Fellowship workshops! The primary sources came from a broader group of databases.

One exciting example is a collection of digitized open-access postcards, atlases, and maps from the NYPL, which I’ll be incorporating into lecture slides to bring historical geography to life. I also found open-access novels, novellas, and short stories on Project Gutenberg that offer rich, personal perspectives on life in 19th- and early 20th-century NYC across diverse communities. These literary sources not only complement the historical narrative but also offer students a more engaging and humanizing window into the past—one that I hope will resonate deeply.

In a period marked by global instability and the ongoing ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic, I view one of my most critical responsibilities as an educator to be the cultivation of empathy. The discipline of history is particularly well-suited to this task, offering students the tools to understand and engage with the experiences of others across time and place. However, structural and individual barriers—both within the academy and in the broader cultural context—often impede students’ ability to form these connections. With the increasing availability of high-quality open-access materials, I aim to bridge this gap by reinforcing the propinquity and relevance of the historical subjects we examine. By doing so, I aim to underscore that the individuals, movements, and institutions we study are not remote or inaccessible, but integral to a shared historical continuum in which the students are themselves participants.

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