2012 Innovative Teaching Award Winner: Andreas Hernandez

International Studies professor Andreas Hernandez

The MMC Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence (C-TIE) congratulates International Studies Professor Andreas Hernandez, who received the Innovative Teaching Award at Faculty Council in May 2012.

Choosing just one project for this award was a challenge–we have a high level of innovative teaching taking place at MMC.  We received a large number of applications, and they each had distinctive merits and were inspiring.  The projects were not only innovative pedagogically, but also socially, culturally, and even politically.  One stood out as particularly innovative in this regard, the one we chose as the winner:  The Marymount Participatory Budget project led by Andreas Hernandez.

Dr. Hernandez has enabled students across five of his classes (three different International Studies courses) in two semesters to actively participate in the first-ever participatory budget process in New York City, which is itself only the second city in the US to engage in participatory budgeting.  The New York project is also the first such process to be initiated by grassroots organizations.  Marymount students are contributing to this historic process in three major ways:  1) making documentary videos of the project, 2) working in internships with the lead organizations; and 3) conducting original research.  One video has already opened the plenary session of an international conference and been posted online by PBS and other organizations.   As Dr. Hernandez said in his application, this project “integrate[s] classroom learning, historical and theoretical debates, with direct engagement and real contribution to socio-political issues.”  Through video production, service work, and research, students demonstrate a complex, holistic, grounded understanding of “how social movements can interface with, and transform, governance structures to make them more democratic,” and they “develop interdisciplinary … knowledge of the meanings of key social and political categories, including society, democracy, governance, citizenship, and social change.”

More good news:  Prof. Hernandez and student Nancy Baez have just published an article on the NYC Participatory Budgeting Project; well done, Prof. Hernandez!

Published: September 05, 2012