This panel argues that emancipatory pedagogy—teaching that treats students as meaning-makers, scholars, and agents rather than passive recipients of instruction—is more important than ever as artificial intelligence reshapes assumptions about authorship, creativity, and the value of humanistic education. Drawing on culturally sustaining pedagogy, translingual practice, multimodal composition, and the recovered legacy of foundational composition scholar Ann E. Berthoff, four CUNY writing instructors demonstrate how emancipatory frameworks operate in the concrete, complicated reality of urban public university classrooms. Panelists take seriously the possibility that "emancipatory" is a complicated word: one that carries significant theoretical weight, risks paternalism if unreflectively applied, and demands ongoing interrogation. Rather than offering a unified manifesto, this panel stages a generative conversation among four CUNY writing instructors who share a commitment to student agency while arriving at it through distinct, sometimes divergent, frameworks.

This panel seeks to meet both practical and theoretical ends. CUNY serves one of the most linguistically, culturally, and economically diverse student populations in the country, making it an unusually rich site for investigating what emancipatory pedagogy looks like in practice. In bringing together scholars who engage different theoretical frameworks in pursuit of similar goals, this session contributes to ongoing conversations in rhetoric and composition about critical pedagogy, translingualism, multimodality, and the epistemological foundations of writing instruction. Panelists describe the successes and failures of their own classrooms, grounding these experiences in scholarship by Paulo Freire, Django Paris and H. Samy Alim, Jerry Won Lee, Gunther Kress, and Ann E. Berthoff, among others.

The session will operate as a standard panel within a 75-minute time frame. Each of the four presenters will speak for approximately 15 minutes, leaving 15 minutes for response and open discussion. Dr. Jessica Yood, Associate Professor of English at Lehman College and The Graduate Center (CUNY), will serve as respondent. Yood's scholarship on composition studies, social justice education, and the institutional history of writing instruction--most recently in The Composition Commons: Writing a New Idea of the University--makes her exceptionally well positioned to synthesize across the four presentations and open the discussion to broader questions about the future of first-year writing in public higher education.

The four presentations address the session's theme from distinct angles. Tuka Al-Sahlani (John Jay College) describes how she implements John Jay's explicitly antiracist first-year writing curriculum, with particular attention to an e-portfolio platform that expands students' sense of audience and opens classroom conversations about voice, visibility, and the relationship between lived experience and academic scholarship. Her presentation argues for multimodal composition as both a critical lens and a making tool that supports multilingual learners and students with varied learning needs. André Perez (Hunter College) explains how Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy provides an effective framework for emancipatory practice, positioning students as emerging scholars whose linguistic and cultural resources are the foundation of writing instruction rather than obstacles to it. He draws on a classroom exchange around a student's challenging question to illustrate how CSP enables productive engagement with difficult material. Rani Srinivasan (Queens College) examines how the word "emancipatory" can carry unintended implications in the college writing classroom and how translingual pedagogical practices help her define liberation on her students' own terms, offering space for literacies beyond Standard American English. She describes a multimodal assignment that works particularly well for multilingual and first-generation students, successfully integrating digital and artistic literacies with research and argumentative writing. Nicole Walker (Lehman College) recovers the underutilized pedagogical legacy of Ann E. Berthoff, arguing that Berthoff's conception of creativity as a mode of intelligence and her pedagogy of "thinking about thinking" offer powerful tools for emancipatory teaching. By pairing Berthoff's triadic language theory with Paulo Freire's goal of conscientization, Walker demonstrates how helping students reflect on their own meaning-making processes can deepen their awareness of how language constructs the social categories that shape their lives.

The panel brings together scholars at various stages of their careers, from doctoral students to senior faculty, across four CUNY campuses. The panelists represent a diversity of backgrounds, languages, and pedagogical traditions, reflecting the student populations they serve and the institutional mission of the City University of New York.