This piece is part of a series by participants in the Winter 2026 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.

Alice Matthews is a Ph.D. student in art history at The Graduate Center, interested in ecogothic and science fictive readings of the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Previously, she was the Jock Reynolds Fellow in Public Programs at the Yale University Art Gallery and received an M.A. from the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art.

Last summer I participated in the Teach@CUNY Summer Institute to better prepare for my first semester of teaching. I knew that the requirements for teaching an introduction to art history course at the City College of New York were not so prescriptive and that I could take quite a few creative liberties in constructing my syllabus. Instead of teaching chronologically, which is standard for the discipline, I was determined to create a thematic course that would foreground some of the most important questions and ideas across the humanities today. I also wanted to create a course that would emphasize the discipline’s transferrable skills no matter what my students would go on to do in school or in life. The inspiring folks involved with the Summer Institute made me excited not only to teach, but to teach in this way. After my first semester as an instructor, I felt confident about the work we were doing together in the classroom, but I felt that the students’ learning could be better supported with more dynamic assigned readings. Cue the Open Knowledge Fellowship!

The Fellowship puts forward a pedagogical approach that is as much grounded in accessibility and student empowerment as it is committed to excellence in scholarship. I learned that ditching an expensive textbook doesn’t mean sacrificing the quality of teaching material—in fact, students’ learning really benefits from the diversity of voices and modalities that a course based on Open Education Resources uses. Over the Fellowship’s six sessions, I became acquainted with these ideas through a rotation of guest speakers while also learning how to practically implement them. For me, that meant putting together a syllabus of open access material to support the thematic organization of the course I had already built while also building a public-facing course website on CUNY Academic Commons. No small task—but with the support of the Fellowship, I was able to accomplish it all in about three weeks. (Just in time for the spring semester!)

Teaching the discipline of art history comes with the privilege of an immense amount of OER. Museums, galleries, archives, libraries, foundations—there is an abundance of open access material already put together by these places precisely because they (often) align with the values of public education. From introductory lesson plans and interactive digital platforms to a range of academic essays, making activities, and podcasts, there is no shortage of places to turn to. I quickly realized that while some of my fellow fellows in other disciplines were facing the challenge of limited OER, I had the inverse problem: I was standing waist-deep in them and the task of choosing what ultimately amounts to a small handful was daunting. I wanted to diversify sources and modalities as often as I could while maintaining a sense of coherency. A textbook, of course, makes it easy. But using OER makes it dynamic. The Fellowship allowed me the time, space, and mentorship to pull together a list of assigned texts that I am now using to teach Art 10000, and which deepens my students’ learning before they even step into the classroom.

Syllabus in hand, the final step was to convert the course to a CUNY Academic Commons website. While I’ll admit navigating WordPress as a first-time user was not intuitive per say, I had so much fun getting to design a digital platform for my course. The Fellowship team really helped me get the hang of it, from the nitty gritty behind-the-scenes design work to making sure my website is as accessible as possible for all users. I have attempted to create a digital home for my students—as well as for any online wanderer who stumbles upon my course website—that mirrors that which I try to foster in class: curiosity, excitement, and community. I am so grateful for having been able to participate in this Fellowship which has not only strengthened my own pedagogical training but allowed me to take part in the kind of work we here at CUNY believe in with our whole chests: that education belongs to everyone.

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