RESults

This course proved more successful than anticipated with the following results and achievements in the Spring 2023:

  • 100% of students enrolled in the course improved and mastered primary and secondary source analysis

  • 100% of students enrolled in the course improved daily attendance rate.

  • 100% of students enrolled in the course graduated with both their HS and Associates Degree Diplomas

  • 88% of students completed community service requirement for stipend.

  • 8 partnerships secured with Newark organizations including: NAACP, Newark Water Coalition, Ironbound Community Corporation, DownBottom Farm, People’s Organization for Progress, The Nork Project, BrownMill Company, NJ Historical Commission

  • 3 student internship/job offers at a community partner site.

  • 80% of student continuing to a Liberal Arts & Sciences higher education institution after graduation

  • One academic article submitted, accepted, and published in George Mason University's World History Connected Journal. Link to the article: View of Teaching the Truth Means Embracing the Community (gmu.edu)

  • 1 permanent community partnership secured with Newark NAACP – President Deborah Smith Gregory now part of Bard Early College-Newark School Leadership Council as Community Representative

  • Puicon awarded 2023 Teaching Award by New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance.

Innovative Newark’s approach as an interdisciplinary course that utilizes project-based learning, community engagement, and student original research achieved these results.  The Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking’s (IWT) techniques allowed students to engage in critical thinking skills and safe avenue for students to explore at depth course material in a way that promoted reflection and analysis. In addition, Bard IWT techniques helped build a collaborative learning environment evidenced in students' responses and images. 

The questions Dr. Puicón crafted enabled students to know that Dr. Puicón cares about their history and their identity as innovative citizens in the city of Newark. In Dr. Puicón’s course and classes, they were able to share, reflect, and analyze those pieces of their identity even if they don’t know them yet fully or were still working through pieces of them. The IWT techniques allowed students to think about the ways the past shapes the present. Ultimately, it's about the students seeing themselves not only in the content of the course but in the practices that they partake in as writers and thinkers. 

Innovative Newark’s success challenges our understanding of the Liberal Arts & Sciences in which we (black and brown folk) are not only capable of understanding, questioning, connecting, and analyzing texts, concepts, and ideas - but where students themselves are at the center of knowledge production, and how revolutionary and empowering this can be for first generation and/or under-represented students. 

Dr. Puicón’s classroom and coursework allow for a space and place to think. Creating such a place and space in Newark transgressing traditional power structures and previous modes/places of knowledge production. In Dr. Puicón’s classroom, Shakespeare, Locke, and Hobbes hold the same weight as Josselin, Oluwakayode, and Ahyanna. The latter are capable of understanding the former and surpassing them. Period.