About
Writ Large: New York City’s Educational Past from the Ground Up contributes to a comprehensive understanding of New York City’s educational past by locating formal and informal sites of teaching and learning in neighborhoods across time and by identifying archival resources in New York City repositories (and elsewhere) to document that history. By mapping sites that include, among others, public schools, branch public libraries, Catholic parochial schools, social settlements, faith-based colleges, professional trade schools, playgrounds, and local YMCAs, Writ Large is designed to document the multiple settings in which diverse New Yorkers learned and capture the reciprocal relationship between education and the transformation of the city. The phrase in the title, “from the Ground Up,” refers both to inquiry into the built (educational) environment on the neighborhood level and a primary objective of the project to generate new perspectives about the history of the city and networks of teaching and learning from the archival record up.
In development, Writ Large is a collaboration between the Center on History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Center for Teaching and Learning at Columbia University. The first stage of the project was piloted in the course, “History of Education in New York City,” taught in the Spring of 2018 at Teachers College by Dr. Bette Weneck. This stage of the project focuseds on sites of teaching and learning on the west side in the borough of Manhattan. Beginning in Spring 2022, students in subsequent versions of the course will add new sites to the map from across the five New York City boroughs.
Principal Investigator
- Rachel Klepper, PhD Candidate, Program in History and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University and Doctoral Fellow, Center on History and Education
Founding Principal Investigator
- Bette Weneck, Associate Director and Lecturer of the Center on History and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, 2011-2018
Research Assistant, 2017-2018
- Eric Strome, Doctoral Candidate, Program in History and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
Contributors
- Adrie Hong
- Catharine Huff
- Matthew Kautz
- Rachel Klepper
- Tom Michael
- Nicole Passante
- Alannah Reilly
- Antonia Joy Robertson
- Alexa Rodriquez
- Neal Schick
- Sharon Shefi
- Erik Stone
- Phillip Twining
- Dardan Ukaj
- Liz Vassallo
- Natalie Wright
- GeColby Youngblood
- Kimberly Zambrano
Center for Teaching and Learning at Columbia University
- Catherine Ross, Executive Director
- Maurice Matiz, Executive Producer
- Andrew Flatgard, Project Manager
- Marc Raymond, Designer
- Susan Dreher, Developer
- Zarina Mustapha, Developer and Designer