dr. erick gordon

Co-Director, NEH Summer Institute

The Future Earth Story Project is a National Endowment for the Humanities–funded teacher institute hosted at Sonoma State University. Co-directed by Erick Gordon, Fawn Canady, and Troy Hicks, the program brings together educators from across the country to explore how storytelling—through literature, drama, and embodied practice—can open up new ways of teaching about climate, sustainability, and the future.

The institute supports teachers in developing creative, interdisciplinary approaches that help students engage with the climate crisis not only as a scientific and political issue, but as a human story. Participants read, move, write, and build together, using embodied inquiry as a way to spark imagination, agency, and hope.

In 2015, Columbia University’s EdLab created a video profile of Dr. Erick Gordon as part of their “Changemaker” series. This short film showcases Dr. Gordon’s project-based teaching philosophy and offers a glimpse into his teaching at the college.

In 2012, Erick Gordon and Adele Bruni launched Writers on Stage, a summer program at Lehman College that invited high school students to explore new ways of responding to literature. Over the course of three summers, students read deeply, collaborated closely, and wrote original plays that “spoke back” to the texts they studied—blurring the line between interpretation and invention. That early experiment in performance-based literary criticism laid the foundation for what would become Literacy Unbound at Teachers College, Columbia University.

At its core, Literacy Unbound is grounded in the belief that play can become a method of inquiry in the secondary classroom. The program challenges traditional distinctions between the creative and the critical, showing that deep, rigorous thinking comes most alive when students are given room to imagine, move, and make.

Now in its second decade, Literacy Unbound represents a long evolution of Gordon’s project-based work in schools, beginning with the Mockingbird Monologues in 1996. The centerpiece of the program is a two-week summer institute where high school teachers and students collaborate to create an original stage performance based on a single literary work. Together, they read, write, and dive into interdisciplinary arts—exploring the text through movement, sound, film, visual art, and more.

Teaching artists guide the group in experimenting with form and medium, layering spoken word with music, remixing passages, and reimagining space as both physical and digital. It’s a space where literature becomes a living thing—and where students and teachers grow as thinkers, artists, and collaborators.

Special recognition goes to co-creators Adele Bruni, Noah Gordon, and Nathan Blum, as well as the many artists, teachers, and young performers who have contributed to shaping Literacy Unbound over the years.

The program continues to thrive at the Center for the Professional Education of Teachers (CPET) at Teachers College, where it remains a home for imaginative learning and meaningful collaboration.

In 1998, combining his small press experience with a passion for student voice, Erick Gordon guided a group of eighth-grade students at the NYC Lab School for Collaborative Studies as they created a Zagat-style book of New York City “best-of” reviews.

What started as a single project—Coring the Apple—opened the door to a new way of thinking about writing instruction, centered on genre, audience, and authentic purpose.

Observing a noticeable shift in how his students approached writing, Gordon began to see publication not as an end product, but as a powerful tool for deepening student engagement and voice. This insight led him to launch the Student Press Initiative (SPI) at Teachers College, Columbia University, a program designed to support educators in making publication a central element of secondary teaching and learning.

At its core, SPI treats publication as a catalyst for student engagement and intellectual ownership. In classrooms across all subjects, students become authors, researchers, and change-makers—writing with purpose, crafting for an audience, and contributing something real to the world.

To grow the work, Gordon built a team of talented educators and creative collaborators, pairing them with teachers across New York City. Together, they co-designed project-based curricula where every student was seen as an author and activist, with something meaningful to say. The impact was immediate: student interest surged, attendance rose, and performance metrics followed suit.

As demand expanded, so did SPI. To date, the initiative has supported over 15,000 students in producing more than 500 original publications. Beyond the classroom, SPI hosts annual Teaching for Publication Institutes, bringing educators from across the country together to share strategies and reimagine what student writing can be.

Special thanks go to Ruth Vinz, Kerry McKibbin, Jim Fenner, and the many artists, educators, and visionaries who have shaped the journey of SPI.

Housed within the Center for the Professional Education of Teachers (CPET) at Teachers College, SPI continues to empower students as thinkers, creators, and published voices in the world.

Erick Gordon began his teaching career in Northern California in 1993 and went on to teach for six years in a New York City public middle school. After nearly two decades in teacher education at Teachers College, Columbia University, he returned to the classroom in 2019 to reconnect with the daily rhythm of school life. He currently teaches English and poetics at Credo High School, a public Waldorf school in Sonoma County, where his curriculum weaves together project-based learning and the arts to deepen engagement and foster creative expression.

Since joining the Waldorf community, Erick has immersed himself in Steiner’s educational philosophy, reflecting on how the spiritual dimensions of Waldorf education can inform and expand his teaching. He brings a spirit of inquiry to this work, integrating his background in student-centered learning with the rhythms, gestures, and pedagogical intentions of the Waldorf tradition.

In the fall of 2007, Dr. Erick Gordon partnered with fellow educator Dr. Lou Cristillo to launch the Muslim Youth Oral History Project, a response to the harmful stereotypes too often directed at Muslim youth in post-9/11 America. With funding from the Ford Foundation, the project introduced the tools and practices of oral history to a group of Muslim teens, equipping them to document the real stories of their peers in New York City public high schools.

What emerged was a powerful collection of twenty-three oral histories—honest, nuanced portraits of teenagers navigating everyday life while bearing the weight of extraordinary scrutiny. These are stories of friendship, faith, identity, and resilience—told in the words of young people too often spoken about, but rarely listened to.

In spring 2008, the project culminated in the publication of This Is Where I Need to Be: Oral Histories of Muslim Youth in NYC, along with a companion curriculum guide for educators. Together, the book and guide offer a meaningful resource for classrooms seeking to center student voice, challenge assumptions, and build understanding through story.

To honor the voices of New York City’s immigrant youth—and to strengthen the literacy skills of students learning English—Erick Gordon brought together a team of 19 educators to design a writing project for English Language Learners across the five boroughs.

Working closely with ELL teachers, the team guided students through the process of collecting and shaping oral histories. Each student began by speaking their story aloud—using their own voice as a first draft. From there, they entered a challenging and rewarding writing process, revising their words into polished chapters for publication in a multi-volume series titled Speaking Worlds.

The students who contributed to the pilot volumes represented more than 15 countries and over 20 native languages. Their stories—grounded in migration, memory, identity, and hope—are as diverse as the city itself.

Each finished volume was professionally bound and distributed to classrooms across New York City, making space for students to see themselves—and one another—on the page.

The attached pages come from the introduction to the Speaking Worlds series: a graphic novel-style preface by artist and scholar Nick Sousanis, drawn from the stories shared by the student authors themselves.

In 2017, Dr. Gordon traveled to Northern India and began a collaboration with Ramana’s Garden, a children’s home in Uttarakhand. Over the next four years, he worked closely with the community on a series of creative projects, including a published collection of personal narratives and a series of short films celebrating language and learning. In one project, students from Ramana’s partnered with high schoolers in New York City to produce a cross-continental podcast called Radio Ramana’s.

Over seven years, the Rikers Island Oral History Project published fourteen volumes of original student writing—some in English, others in dual-language format (Spanish/English). The project gave hundreds of incarcerated youth the chance to share their voices and experiences with a wider world, offering a sense of authorship and agency too often denied to them.

In 2004, Erick Gordon assembled a team of skilled educators, including Kerry McKibbin, David Iasevoli, Jim Fenner, and Lalith Vasudevan, to develop a methodology that would support literacy, self-expression, and critical thinking among incarcerated youth.

Rooted in oral history, collaborative writing, and elements of narrative therapy, the team worked with students at Horizon Academy inside Rikers Island. For four months, students engaged in structured storytelling, reflecting on their lives, writing collaboratively, and revising drafts not just for clarity and craft, but also as a means of reimagining their own narratives. Revision became both a literary and personal act: a chance to shape language and, in some small way, reshape the future. Along the way, students built essential reading and writing skills and worked toward earning their GEDs.

Goat on a Cow is a 23-minute NPR radio documentary that grew out of Erick Gordon’s original Ella Chase Curriculum—a project rooted in found objects, speculative narrative, and the power of personal connection to history.

The curriculum began in the mid-1990s, when Gordon came across an unlikely archive on a sunbaked stretch of California highway: a single handwritten letter, still in its envelope, postmarked January 1955. Nearby, scattered across the roadside, were more than 300 pieces of ephemera—brittle newspaper clippings, faded photographs, scrawled recipes, and dozens of letters—all addressed to a woman named Ella Chase. There was no sign of how they had ended up there.

Who was Ella Chase? Was she still alive? Had someone thrown away the fragments of her life? And why?

The collection, with its chorus of voices—friends, lovers, soldiers, salesmen, congressmen—offered fleeting glimpses of Ella’s life, without ever fully revealing it. One letter, however, stood out: unopened, in her own handwriting, stamped Return to Sender. Gordon decided never to open it. Instead, he shared her story—what little there was—and invited others to imagine the rest.

As he sifted through the letters, Gordon found his own life filtering into the process. The act of piecing together Ella’s world became a mirror for reflecting on his own experiences. It revealed a deeper truth: artifacts are not just windows into lost histories—they’re also vessels for projection, a way for us to make meaning from fragments and silence.

This insight evolved into a broader approach to teaching—one that invites students to see artifacts not just as historical remnants, but as openings into untold stories. Whether it’s a letter from a flea market bin, a forgotten photograph in a library book, or a scrap of handwriting on the back of a receipt, these everyday objects become springboards for inquiry, imagination, and meaning-making. Rather than treating texts as the only source of story, this method encourages students to look at the world itself as a text—rich with clues, absences, and the potential to construct something new. While many classrooms prompt students to write alternate endings or character monologues, Gordon’s approach expands that frame, inviting students to cultivate a deeper attention to the ordinary, the discarded, the half-told. Through this, they begin to understand that the world is full of stories waiting to be noticed—and made new.

At Millennium Art Academy in the Bronx, a unique collaboration brought together eleventh-grade students and neighborhood elders in an intergenerational oral history project led by Erick Gordon, Kerry McKibbin, and a team of dedicated educators. Throughout the school year, students and seniors formed book groups, shared memories, and studied history side by side—building trust and curiosity across generations.

As the project deepened, students became oral historians, gathering, transcribing, and editing the life stories of their elder partners for publication. The result was Speak to Us of Work: Bronx Oral Histories, a collection rich with lived experience—from marching alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to recalling a $2.72 weekly wage in 1926, when a frankfurter and soda cost just two cents, to making soap by hand in a coal-stove kitchen.

At its core, the Intergenerational Oral History Project is about listening deeply, valuing connection, and recognizing that learning flows both ways—between generations and through stories that might otherwise be lost.

What happens when students step inside a character’s life instead of just analyzing it?

In The Mockingbird Monologues, a project created by Erick Gordon in 1996, eighth-grade students explored character deeply through original monologues inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird. What began with drawing a character’s name from a hat evolved over four months into a staged performance in an off-Broadway theater. Along the way, students answered hundreds of questions about their characters’ inner lives—imagining memories, fears, and desires—while using their own experiences as entry points into the text.

The project became a bridge between literature and lived experience, transforming character analysis into a personal, creative act. Final performances were supported by rich portfolios that documented each student’s journey from reader to writer to performer. In finding their characters’ voices, students often discovered a deeper sense of empathy—and a deeper sense of themselves.

Dr. Erick Gordon taught graduate writing courses at Columbia University’s Teachers College for over sixteen years—six as a full-time lecturer and ten as an adjunct. His classes focused on rhetorical purpose and writing for audience in the most immediate and meaningful way possible: by supporting students in becoming published authors.

Graduate students explored creative nonfiction genres that brought elegance and style to writing grounded in real-world experience. Each semester culminated in a capstone project: a collection of educator profiles that reflected not only the students’ growth as writers, but also their evolving understanding of what it means to be a teacher. Over time, fourteen volumes of the Profiles of Educators series were published, building a vibrant library of teaching lives in print.

LGBTQ+ Student Voices

In partnership with the Harvey Milk High School, Erick Gordon and the Student Press Initiative collaborated with LGBTQ+ students to transform spoken-word performances into powerful written narratives. These stories explore gender identity, the process of coming out, the complexity of labels, and the everyday realities of navigating school as an LGBTQ+ young person.

Published in the collection I Know I’m Not Me, the student voices are self-aware, thoughtful, and courageous, offering educators and peers alike an honest and deeply personal window into the lives of LGBTQ+ youth in public schools.

For Every Voice, A Different Truth is one of several SPI initiatives that flips the traditional script—placing students in the role of curriculum designers for their own schools.

In this project, tenth-grade students at the Institute for Media and Writing in Lower Manhattan created a guide for advisory classes, aimed at helping teachers lead thoughtful, honest conversations about the issues most pressing to high school students. The student authors tackled topics such as discrimination, peer pressure, drug use, sexuality, relationships, and the stress of college decisions—bringing firsthand experience and insight to each.

More than a book, the project reflects a core SPI belief: that students are not just learners, but meaning-makers. By writing for teachers, they not only deepen their own understanding but reshape how education responds to real student lives. A companion CD of audio reflections was published alongside the guide.

Coring the Apple began as a simple genre experiment: a student-created take on the Zagat Guide. But in the hands of eighth-grade students at the NYC Lab School, it became something more—a model for how young people can engage with their surroundings as critics, writers, and cultural observers.

This first SPI publication helped shape a core principle of the work: that the world itself is usable curriculum. A restaurant review isn’t just a consumer exercise—it’s a chance to practice research, structure, tone, persuasion, and audience awareness. A walk through the city becomes fieldwork. Categories like “Best Place to Be Watched by What You’re Eating” or “Best Park Bench to Quietly Finish Your Homework” reveal how genre can bend to fit student perspective.

Coring the Apple offers more than a clever project—it suggests a way of seeing curriculum. What if, every time we encountered something engaging out in the world, we asked: “How could my students do that?” What if the world outside the classroom—Best of the City roundups at the newsstand, staff picks at indie bookstores, bios on museum walls, or an Anna Deavere Smith documentary-style play—became inspiration for classroom projects? With that shift, the everyday becomes a laboratory for learning, and students become authors of the world they inhabit.

In one of the Student Press Initiative’s earliest projects, students in the Literature of Social Justice course at The Beacon School in New York City interviewed and profiled activists from a wide range of fields. Artists, journalists, filmmakers, translators, and community organizers all became subjects of student writing, their stories captured in a published series titled About Face: Profiles of Activism.

The books were later distributed to other high school classrooms, serving as both a resource and a call to action—offering young readers real-life examples of people working toward justice, and inviting them to imagine how they might do the same.

In Soundtracks of Our Lives, students explored what happens when personal stories and music criticism meet—an example of how SPI encourages writing that crosses traditional genre lines.

Inspired by Felicia Pride’s essays in The Message and Nick Hornby’s Songbook, students wrote about the songs that mattered most to them. Each piece began with a personal story connected to the music, then shifted into a reflection and analysis of the song itself. The result was a blend of memoir and music criticism—mixing narrative with persuasion, memory with meaning.

Soundtracks of Our Lives grew out of a practice of noticing hybrid genres in the world—like music memoirs that blend personal reflection with cultural critique—and turning them into meaningful writing opportunities for students.