Katherine Figueroa
Lecturer
Academic Literacy and Linguistics
EMAIL: kfigueroa@bmcc.cuny.edu
Office: N-499J
Office Hours: Email for office hours: kfigueroa@bmcc.cuny.edu
Phone: +1 (212) 220-8000;ext=7358
Katherine Figueroa is a lecturer in the Department of Academic Literacy and Linguistics at BMCC. She is bilingual in Spanish and English and also speaks French fluently. She spent her early childhood in her father’s native Chile. As an adult, she worked at a nonprofit social service agency in North Philadelphia, managing education and prevention programs for low-income children. She then moved to NYC to pursue a master’s degree. After graduating, she began teaching developmental Academic and Critical Reading (ACR 94/95) as well as credit-bearing Critical Thinking courses (CRT 100/100.5) at BMCC, where she has been teaching full time since 2010. She also began teaching ESL classes in August of 2022.
Her professional interests include advocating for developmental students’ needs at CUNY. She served as co-chair of the CUNY Reading Discipline Council and as a member of CUNY’s Reading Assessment Panel and CUNY’s Developmental Reading and Writing Advisory Council. She also co-led professional development Reading Across the Curriculum workshops at BMCC and at other colleges as well.
Her personal interests include conservation and the environment, especially where birds are concerned. She holds a NYS Wildlife Rehabilitation license.
Expertise
Assessment and intervention, reading disabilities
Reading instruction, children and adults
Developmental education
Degrees
A.B., Bryn Mawr College, English with minor in Education
M.A., Teachers College, Columbia University, Applied Educational Psychology: Reading Specialist with Bilingual Emphasis
Courses Taught
- ESL 94RW is an integrated skills course that emphasizes academic writing and critical reading. In writing, students focus on introducing, developing, supporting, and organizing their ideas in descriptive, narrative, and expository formats. In reading, students develop comprehension through the practice of literal, inferential and critical reading skills, vocabulary development, flexible reading rates, and study skills. Through coursework which integrates these essential academic capacities, students will be prepared for advanced coursework.
- This course is designed to support the improvement of writing skills of ESL 54 students. It is obligatory for one semester for all incoming ESL students whose placement shows a need for instruction at this level.
Corequisite: ESL 54 - Students will learn discipline-specific strategies for reading effectively and critically in humanities fields such as philosophy and history. Students will apply strategies used by experts in these fields to interact with authentic texts in these disciplines. Specifically, students will focus on vocabulary, grammatical and rhetorical nuances, as well as authorial awareness, when interpreting texts in these fields. Strategies learned in this course will ultimately help students learn to read, write, and think like experts in the humanities.
- Critical Thinking (Same as CRT 100) is designed to develop the mind and help students learn to think clearly and effectively. Through substantive readings, structured writing assignments and ongoing discussions, students will examine concrete examples from their own experience and readings and contemporary issues in the media to learn how to analyze issues, solve problems, and make informed decisions in their academic, professional, and personal lives.
