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.

Hope Cullinan is a PhD student in the Department of Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at the Graduate Center, interested in Spanish language in the United States and the use of art and performance cultural formation and language learning. She did graduate coursework in Spanish at Hunter College and has an MSc in Art History from Edinburgh University (UK). As a Graduate Teaching Fellow, she teaches Spanish at Queens College.

Those of us who teach language in New York City are particularly lucky to do so in a full and varied linguistic landscape. Teaching Spanish is even more fun: those indirect objects we’ve been learning you probably heard on the bus on your way here. Most CUNY students have some experience with Spanish language at school, at home, with their friends, through television or overhead conversation. The Spanish that our students know is also varied—they hear and speak Spanish from different parts of the world, mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean. Aside from learning grammar, we often discuss linguistic and cultural variation, and Spanish language in New York City, the United States, and beyond.

For that reason, I try to have a variety of things beyond our textbook to read, watch, listen to, and discuss in class. I was grateful during the Open Knowledge Fellowship to have the time, focus, and invaluable guidance of the Graduate Center’s specialists to create an open access collection of texts on Manifold that my students and I can use together in class (and that they can return to after the semester is over). Styled loosely on the “reader”, a learning tool with a long history in language classes, I’ve put together texts that aim to get students talking about New York City, thinking about language, and playing with nouns, verbs, adjectives, and meaning. So far this semester, we’ve read the Cuban writer José Martí, who wrote about the blizzard of 1888 in New York City (we returned to this text twice, during two snowstorms that closed the college), and discussed narration in different past tenses while reading excepts of the Florentine Codex (which we also used to write poetry).

After becoming interested in Open Education Resources—invaluable tools in making knowledge available to everyone—I heard about the Open Knowledge Fellowship. My hope in my career is to serve the broadest possible public, and the Fellowship allowed me to expand the work that I do at CUNY beyond our classroom in Queens by creating something that is freely available to other teachers and students. Next, I’d like to get students involved in the project itself, using Manifold’s annotation function. When they are most invested in their own learning and are happy to be together in a classroom sharing language, it’s a thing to behold. At a point in which we are all deciding how we use technology to teach and learn and live our lives, the ability to share language in our classroom in New York City and with other students and teachers wherever they are is truly meaningful.

Finding public domain material for intermediate Spanish students led me to a 1923 newspaper advertisement for real estate in Flushing, which makes a good conversation starter in classes at Queens College. “What is your opinion?” the ad asks, saying that “Flushing is a beautiful place.” Students can respond a hundred years later.

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