CUNY-wide Collaboration and Innovation for the New Digital Era of Japanese Language Education aims to develop a large-scale, cross-institutional repository of online instructional resources for instructors of the Japanese language. This new large-scale collaboration at the City University of New York (CUNY), the largest urban public university system in the United States, is the direct response to the urgent need for online instruction due to the global health crisis in early 2020, which took place with a minimal amount of preparation and resources for the instructors of Japanese. During this challenging transition time to distance education, 25+ Japanese language faculty at CUNY forged an unprecedented level of collaboration and shared their expertise and experience in online instruction to deliver their courses in a fully online mode. The main goal of CCI-2020 is to sustain and strengthen this collaborative effort through designing a platform, on which the CUNY Japanese instructors (1) collectively design and develop instructional materials for either online or in-person instruction, that are culturally-sensitive and appropriate for the diverse demographic and socioeconomic realities of the CUNY students, (2) share their critical feedback to teaching resources designed by peers, (3) reduce the economic burden of the CUNY students who are under economic pressure, including ones who come from a low-income family background, and (4) strengthen the network with Japanese/Japanese American communities in the city and beyond. Hosted at CUNY Academic Commons, the CCI-2020 online resource repository will be the central platform for CUNY Japanese instructors to design, share, and critique pedagogical materials to prepare for the new digital era of teaching and learning of the Japanese language.

This project is supported by the Japan Foundation, Los Angeles.