St. John's News

Attending college in New York City is a unique experience. That’s why in 2001, St. John’s University created an innovative core-curriculum course to introduce first-year students to the “Big Apple” and educate them about its resources, empower them to search and explore and inspire them to dream big dreams.

It’s called Discover New York (DNY) and it provides 3000-plus St. John’s freshman each year with the opportunity to experience New York City as classroom and textbook. DNY enhances the college experience by helping students integrate into the St. John’s community, providing shared opportunities and fostering student success in an increasingly demanding environment.

DNY views the City through the lens of a particular subject discipline and focuses on themes of race and ethnicity, religion, immigration, wealth and poverty, and the environment. It combines in-class instruction with cultural and historical resources, and requires at least one field trip.

This fall, nine DNY faculty members will be escorting—literally and figuratively— 80 freshman classes to areas within New York City’s boundaries to experience its people, history, architecture, and culture; 50-60 classes will do the same in the spring.

English and Classics Professor Robert Forman, Ph.D., is a DNY pioneer, having taught the course since its inception. His objective for the course is to recognize the past in forming the future and he organizes it around a series of six Saturday morning walking tours.

Throughout the semester the English professor and his class crisscross Manhattan from the Battery to the Upper West Side to learn the city’s history. In between the tours, he explains, classes “cover the history and imagery of what we see at the locations themselves.” Students must contribute a 500-word entry to the class blog after each tour.

“Reacting to the Past”
Professor Paula Lazrus takes a different tack. She uses a variation of the “reacting to the past” pedagogy, which consists of elaborate games set in the past, to examine the decisions made by citizens in pre-Revolutionary New York City. Students are given the role of real and invented people—politicians, gentlemen landowners, slaves, women, etc.—and through six sessions of argumentation must decide what position to take on the various issues that arise.

“I tell them to insert themselves into history and make their decisions based on what they know or have learned about the situation being discussed,” she explains. Even the two papers they are required to write must be written in the first person as the character they’ve been assigned to role-play.

Dr. Lazrus’ students visit three historical homes in Manhattan to see how people lived during three periods in history. They travel to the Merchant Museum, a single-family home from 1803 to 1903; to the Tenement Museum, to tour a replicated 1863 apartment of an immigrant family on the Lower East Side; and to the Frick Museum on the Upper East Side, the 1910 home of industrialist Henry Clay Frick.

“I ask them to consider how society, work relations, etc., of the various families whose homes they visit are impacted as the population moved uptown.” Her students also complete independent projects on particular neighborhoods in the city that are assigned to them.

Homelessness in NYC
Professor Heidi Upton, D.M.A., who has taught DNY since 2003, is for the first time teaching DNY through the lens of homelessness. Also for the first time, she’s incorporating service learning into this new treatment, which examines that state of poverty “through the lenses of two art forms: documentary photography and spoken word poetry.”

Dr. Upton is requiring her students, all members of the University’s Social Justice Learning Community, to perform at least nine hours of service. To date, they’ve worked in the Coalition for the Homeless’ Grand Central Food program and in St. John’s Midnight Run, both of which deliver food to those living on the street, as well as at the Briarwood Family Shelter, where they’re involved in the children’s' recreation program.
At present, she reports her students are beginning their first photo essay, which they will eventually share in the class wiki on a dedicated DNY website.

“In this assignment, they're searching for traces of homelessness, as well as explicit examples,” she explains. “Searching out traces requires the ‘critical thinking’ that’s an important part of core courses. And, in their essays, they're putting together narratives, connecting photos they’ve taken that contain layers of meaning with what they're learning through readings and experiences”

Immigration Experiences Explored
Robert Tomes, Ph.D. has also taught DNY since its debut in 2001. He’s as passionate about New York City as he is about history and loves the fact that he can couple the two in DNY. “This course gives me a chance to bring that feeling of being a New Yorker—of the cultural connection I have with the city—into the classroom,” he says.

Dr. Tomes takes his classes on frequent tours, “so they can research their subjects firsthand. Rather than just hear about the Indians or the colonists, they see for themselves the actual historical sites and artifacts.” He, too, requires essays on assigned subjects for which he supplies research-oriented questions.

Asked what are some of the more popular field trips, Dr. Tomes replies, “The Lower East Side Tenement Museum. In the past, many St. John’s students came from families that immigrated through Ellis Island. Immigration patterns are very different now. Today’s students, whose parents came from Haiti, Trinidad, Mexico, Asia and the Middle East, find this fascinating. They’re amazed to see the conditions in which New Yorkers once lived. To see poverty in this way is an eye-opener.”

He notes that students are also interested in economic institutions and Wall Street because they want to find out why New York became “such a unique and vibrant hub.”

By the end of the semester, Dr. Tomes muses, students additionally discover something about themselves.

“Most of them are surprised to learn that the questions we have today about race and identity are not new questions. And they are even more surprised to learn that things have actually improved. On the whole, though, once students realize the history of New York is a sort of constant, ongoing engaging event, it’s something they are very excited about.”