In March 2020, New York City became the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, and during the spring, the City University of New York (CUNY) suffered more deaths than any other university system in the United States. (Valbrun, 2020).

Against this backdrop, the CUNY Graduate Center’s Teaching and Learning Center (GCTLC)—which supports CUNY graduate student instructors who teach 150,000 undergraduates yearly—created new supports for all faculty. In this reflective practice presentation we will discuss how GCTLC staff centered access to open materials and practices of care while empowering students and faculty teaching during unprecedented times.

On March 6th, anticipating the shut down of in-person instruction, the GCTLC released “Considerations for Instructional Continuity” (http://cuny.is/continuity) on the CUNY Academic Commons, a university-wide open platform. The site emphasized the limited financial and digital resources that CUNY faculty and students had at their disposal, and prioritized community, care, and openness as the university steeled itself for the pandemic.

When CUNY announced the transition to remote instruction a week later, the GCTLC launched two resources. The first included tips to guide faculty through the transition by helping them translate face-to-face instructional strategies to flexible online modalities. The second was a Slack space, open to all, that could facilitate resource sharing and collective support. Two thousand CUNY colleagues joined.

Our guidance prioritized getting through the semester without creating additional stresses. At the same time, as long-time open education advocates, we were aware that the speed of the transition to remote instruction might drive the community deeper into the grips of proprietary enterprise educational technologies. From the beginning of the crisis, then, we balanced support for faculty on the tools with which they were familiar with assertions of the value of existing open options at CUNY. This approach has extended through the summer and fall and into 2021.

In this presentation, we will detail how a culture of openness and care were present in the Summer Institute we designed for first time college teachers in June (http://cuny.is/tcuny); the GC Online project launched to support graduate faculty (http://cuny.is/gconline); efforts to raise awareness of extractive edtech via a challenge to CUNY’s contract with TurnitIn (Waltzer, Rhody and Shirazi, 2020); the open release of all of the GCTLC’s workshops (http://cuny.is/tlc-workshop-archive); as well as the ongoing revision of our Teach@CUNY Handbook, a guide for college teachers that incorporates the values our team brings to its work each year (https://cuny.is/tcuny-handbook).