dr. erick gordon

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.

“Over 500 books and counting…”

In 2002, Erick Gordon used his small press background to lead a group of eighth-grade students at the NYC Lab School for Collaborative Studies in creating a book of Zagats-inspired reviews. For Gordon, this was a new way of publishing with students, an experiment in writing through focused genre for a target audience. Inspired by the enthusiasm he witnessed in his students, and certain that publication-based curriculum could have a profound effect on how all learners approach writing, Gordon set out to build a program for teachers to embed publication into secondary school curriculum. The resulting Student Press Initiative (SPI) at Teachers College, Columbia University, is now one of the largest and most widely circulated curriculum-embedded student publication programs in the world.

In SPI, publication is a tool to engage students as active producers of knowledge, and this tool can be woven into any subject area and classroom—transforming schools into publishing houses with teams of young authors writing with purpose.

Gordon built the SPI team by searching out talented educators and hiring them to work with classroom teachers around New York City. Collaborative partnerships teams designed project-based curricula in which every student was considered an author, activist and orator, with something valuable to share with the world. The results were immediate; Gordon and the teachers with whom he worked saw increased student interest and engagement, attendance and test scores were improved dramatically.

As demand for the organization's expertise grew, SPI grew. To date, SPI has worked with over 15,000 students on over 500 publications. In addition to their embedded work in schools, the organization hosts intensive ‘Teaching for Publication Institutes’ where both new and experienced teachers come together from around the Country to share strategies for bringing student publishing into the classroom.

Special recognition goes out to Ruth Vinz, Kerry McKibbin and Jim Fenner—and scores of artists, teachers, and creative collaborators that have been a part of the Student Press Initiative adventure over the years.

SPI is still thriving at the Center for the Professional Education of Teachers (CPET), at Teachers College, Columbia University.

In 2012 Erick Gordon and Adele Bruni built a program at Lehman College called Writers on Stage to explore new techniques for responding to literature. For three summers, Bruni and Gordon led a group of high school students as they authored original plays that 'spoke back' to literature, creating a new form of performance-based literary criticism. The project eventually evolved into what is now the Literacy Unbound Program at Teachers College.

Predicated on a belief in the power of play in the secondary classroom, Literacy Unbound seeks to unbind traditional approaches to the teaching of reading, writing, listening, and speaking, troubling the divide between critical and creative thinking, demonstrating that intellectual rigor ultimately requires both. Literacy Unbound is the current iteration of over two decades of Dr. Gordon’s project-based education methods, beginning with the Mockingbird Monologues in 1996.

The main feature of the program is a summer immersion that brings together high school teachers in creative collaboration with high school students as they create an original performance for the stage based on a single literary text.

The Literacy Unbound approach integrates reading, writing, and discussion with artistic experimentation through drama, music, dance, film, and visual art. With the help of guest teaching artists, teachers step into reading and writing through improvisational sound and movement, experimenting with the layering of mode and medium, the interplay between physical and digital space, and the remixing of text on text.

Special recognition goes out to co-creators Adele Bruni, Noah Gordon, and Nathan Blum—and scores of artists, teachers, and creative collaborators that have been a part of the Literacy Unbound adventure over the years.

Literacy Unbound still thrives today at the Center for the Professional Education of Teachers (CPET), at Teachers College, Columbia University.

In the fall of 2007 Dr. Erick Gordon teamed up with fellow educator Dr. Lou Cristillo to create the Muslim Youth Oral History Project as a way to dispel stereotypes about Muslim Youth in NYC. The project, funded by the Ford Foundation, introduced the methods of oral history to a group of Muslim teenagers, preparing them to set out to document the real-life experiences and feelings of their Muslim peers in New York City high schools. The result is a compelling collection of twenty-three oral histories. These are voices of teenagers living ordinary lives at a time when being Muslim in America can provoke “extraordinary” reactions from classmates and teachers, from friends and strangers, and even from one's own family and kin.

This is Where I Need to Be: Oral Histories of Muslim Youth in NYC and the companion curriculum guide were published in the spring of 2008.

In an effort to tap into the rich experiences of New York City’s young immigrant community, all the while ramping up the literacy skills of students with emerging English skills, Erick Gordon assembled a team of 19 educators to develop and implement a groundbreaking writing project for a citiwide English Language Learner population.

In collaboration with ELL educators, this teaching team led students through a process of recording their oral histories, and then crafting their stories into chapters for publication in a multi-volume collection entitled Speaking Worlds. Students began with the spoken word as a first draft, a point of departure that led to a rigorous writing process culminating in the publication of a professionally bound volume to be distributed to classrooms around New York City. Student participants in the pilot project represented over 15 countries and 20 different native languages.

The attached pages are the introduction from the published Speaking Worlds series, a graphic novel-style introduction by artist Nick Sousanis drawing directly from the student authors’ stories.

In 2016 Dr. Gordon traveled to Northern India and launched a collaboration with Ramana's Garden, a children's home in Uttarakhand. Over the next four years he worked with the children’s home on numerous projects; they published a book of personal narratives and produced a series of short films celebrating language and learning. In one project, the children in India collaborated with students from a NYC high school on a podcast called "Radio Ramana's".

Over the course of seven years, the Rikers Island Oral History Project published fourteen volumes of original student writing in both English and dual language (Spanish/English). The program helped hundreds of incarcerated youth discover the power of sharing their words with the world.

In 2004 Erick Gordon assembled a team of talented educators to create a methodology that would support literacy and learning with incarcerated youth.

Drawing from the traditions of oral history, collaborative writing and narrative therapy, the team supported students at Horizon Academy, Rikers Island. For four months students engaged in guided storytelling, crafting new texts and considering new paths—a process in which revision is as much about crafting content as imagining new possibilities for the future—all the while building critical reading and writing skills and preparing for the GED.

Goat on a Cow is a 23 minute NPR radio documentary that grew out of Erick Gordon’s original Ella Chase Curriculum.

The Ella Chase Curriculum was born in the mid-90s when Erick Gordon discovered an overlooked treasure on a stretch of sun burnt California highway: a handwritten letter, still in its envelope, postmarked January 1955. Nearby, brittle newspapers clippings, black and white photos, scrawled recipes, more letters and ephemera — more than 300, all addressed to a woman named Ella Chase— lay scattered along the road with no sign of how they ended up there.

Who was this woman? Was she alive or dead? Had a custodian of her estate carelessly discarded the objects that made up this woman's life?

Ella Chase’s collection of letters offer a medley of voices — from friend, to World War II soldier, to mattress company, to congressmen — all shedding light on who she might have been. The only exception being the single, unopened letter in her own hand, marked Return to Sender. Gordon decided he would never read that letter. Instead, he would share her story — what fragments he had— and invite others to imagine the rest.

To fill in the gaps and spaces in the implied narrative of Ella's life, Gordon soon, consciously or not, began drawing on his own lived experiences. The fabric of his own life was emerging in the process of culling “important” data from the letters. The experience was profound, creative and personally — an artifact is not only a doorway to a lost story, but a vehicle for the viewer to project themselves to better make sense of what lies in front of them. The interaction the viewer has with the artifact can be a dynamic force, resulting in a new expression of an imagined story.

While many classrooms make use of texts as the basis for dependent authorship (student-authored monologues or alternate endings, for example) Gordon also challenges students to read inspiration in the world around them — from the history contained in the cracks in the pavement, to a handwritten note on the ground, leading students to a heightened sense of awareness, possibility and openness.

In 2004 Erick Gordon led a team of talented educators to create an intergenerational oral history project at Millennium Art Academy High School in the Bronx. Over the course of the school year eleventh grade students collaborated with Bronx senior citizens, studying history together, reading in mixed age book groups and telling stories. Ultimately the students became oral historians for the seniors, gathering, transcribing and editing stories for publication.

At its core the Intergenerational Oral History Project is about building relationships and learning from the perspectives of elders in the community. Highlights from the first book, Speak to Us of Work: Bronx Oral Histories, include a memory about marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; the meaning of a $2.72 weekly wage back in 1926, when a frankfurter and soda were just 2 cents; and what it took to make bath soap from scratch in a coal-stove kitchen.

What if writing were a vehicle to help build empathy through deep (re)readings of literature?

In the Mockingbird Monologues, a project Erick Gordon created in 1996, students perform original monologues based on in-depth literary analysis on stage in off-Broadway theaters. The power of audience propels this four-month empathic expedition.

As an educator committed to widening his students’ points of reference, Gordon wondered how best to use literature to teach children about empathy by way of character analysis. When it came time to take up To Kill a Mockingbird with his students, Gordon envisioned a new type of curriculum — one that illuminated the connective possibilities for students by using writing to bridge the gap between themselves and characters in books.

The project began with a desire to teach a classic in a new way, but over the course of four months, the endeavor grew. Gordon led his students through a process that began with drawing a character name from a hat, and ended with presenting a fully-realized monologue in costume, on an off-Broadway stage, to a community of teachers, peers and family. In between was rigorous curriculum that aimed to help students discover the experiences in themselves that they could translate into meaningful connections with another. Students worked extensively for weeks to answer questions (hundreds of them) about who their characters were. What made them tick? What was the character's favorite color? Most treasured childhood memory? In answering these questions, students inevitably used pieces of their own lives and of themselves to inform the created realities of their characters — co-creating the text along with Harper Lee. The students' writing expanded into final project-based portfolios that tracked the process of development. At the end of the project, students had not only deepened their understandings of those whose stories they had created — they had found new possibilities for compassion and understanding within themselves.

Gordon’s Mockingbird Monologues, a classroom project that began in 1996, is a four-month expedition culminating in student performances of original monologues based on in-depth literary analysis. Gordon led his students through a process that began in the classroom, drawing a character’s name from a hat, and ended with each of his 120 eighth graders presenting a fully-realized monologue in costume, on an off-Broadway stage, to a community of teachers, peers and family. In between was rigorous curriculum that aimed to help students discover the experiences in themselves that they could translate into meaningful connections with another.

Dr. Erick Gordon taught writing to graduate students at Columbia University’s Teachers College for eight as a full-time lecturer, and another eight years as an adjunct. In his courses, students studied rhetorical purpose and writing for audiences in the most immediate, resonant way possible: by becoming published authors themselves.

Student authors explored creative nonfiction genres that infuse writing about the real world with elegance and style. The culminating project of the semester-long study, a collection of profiles of educators, not only demonstrates the students' growth as writers, it demonstrates a new understanding of what it means to be an educator. Fourteen volumes of the Profiles of Educators series were published, building a rich library of teaching lives on paper.

LGBTQ+ Student Voices

In collaboration with the Harvey Milk High School, Erick Gordon and the Student Press Initiative worked with LGBTQ+ students to transform lyrical spoken-word performances into compelling narratives about gender identity and sexuality, the process of coming out and the complexity of labels. Intended to educate teachers and students about LGBTQ+ youth experiences in public schools, the voices published in the book, I Know I’m Not Me are self-aware, thoughtful and brave.

For Every Voice, A Different Truth is one of numerous SPI projects in which students write curriculum for teachers.

The book is a guide for advisory classes written by tenth grade students at the Institute for Media and Writing in Lower Manhattan. The curriculum guide is designed to help teachers lead discussions around complex social issues most relevant to high school students. The range of perspectives and student voices examines topics like discrimination, drugs, peer pressure, sexuality, relationships and choosing the right collage. A companion CD was published with the guide.

Coring the Apple: The Best of New York

Coring the Apple is a creative Zagat Guide-like rating of the “Best-Of ’” New York City. This was the first SPI publication, created when Erick Gordon was an eighth-grade teacher at the New York City Lab School. Building what would ultimately become the essence of SPI’s philosophy—student as writer/student as expert—authors address subjects ranging from “The Best Place to be Watched by What You’re Eating” to “The Best Park Bench to Quietly Finish Your Homework.”

In one of Student Press Initiative's earliest projects, Literature of Social Justice students at The Beacon School in New York City interviewed and wrote about social activists from across all walks of life. The work of these artists, journalists, filmmakers, translators, and organizers was showcased in a series of books titled, About Face: Profiles of Activism. The published books were then distributed to other high school classrooms to inspire further visions of social justice and social change.

Soundtracks of Our Lives, is another example of SPI’s approach to genre-mashup. Taking inspiration from essays by Felicia Pride, in The Message, and Nick Hornby, in Songbook, students wrote about the songs that held meaning in their lives. They first told the story the song holds for them, and then wrote about the song itself. The resulting genre blends musical criticism with memoir, combining personal narrative with persuasion.