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Common Reading at LaGuardia Community College: Core Books at CUNY

General Info

Core Books at CUNY is 36-month Teagle Foundation sponsored project that originated at Hostos Community College and is now extended to three other CUNY campuses: The Borough of Manhattan Community College, LaGuardia Community College, and New York City College of Technology. It started as a collaboration between Columbia College and Hostos Community College with the goal of embedding core texts and the issues they raise from the Columbia Core Curriculum into selected required courses at CUNY. This faculty professional development initiative aims to engage students in key humanistic questions while strengthening their reading and writing skills and bolstering student performance related to course learning objectives. At the heart of this initiative is the recognition of the value of a community of practice among faculty and among students as we create opportunities to think, to learn, and to question together.

Our project aims to disrupt the isolation of the classroom for both faculty and students. Often faculty do not have the opportunity to think together about what they are going to do in the classroom, and often students do not have a community of peers to read and write with. The implementation of this project will create a community of practice among faculty and students.​

For more information about the program, please see the Core Books at CUNY website.

Core Books at CUNY: Reading list

  • Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates
  • Plato, The Republic
  • Homer, The Odyssey
  • Sophocles, Oedipus the King
  • Sophocles, Antigone
  • Dante, Inferno
  • Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
  • The Declaration of Independence
  • James Madison, The Federalist Paper No. 10
  • The Constitution of the United States
  • Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
  • Frederick Douglass, “What to the Negro is the Fourth of July?”
  • WEB Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
  • Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
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