This essay considers the importance of nonstandard English to fostering a more inclusive and incisive Shakespeare classroom. Grady focuses on his experience as the instructor of a Shakespeare course that occasionally employed African American Vernacular English in its analysis of texts. His reflection considers how taking such language seriously encourages more genuine participation from a wide range of students. While this pedagogical approach offers one manner in which the field of early modern studies might expand points of access and foster cross-cultural dialogue, it also stands to deepen the analytic possibilities of the Shakespeare classroom. Grady uses the example of African American Vernacular English to demonstrate that nonstandard English can offer particularly nuanced means through which to investigate and discuss Shakespeare's works.

This article explores the struggle to transport an ethos of white antiracism across different racial climates within two university contexts. The author analyzes the influence that students' home rhetorics of racism and their conceptualizations about “progressive” white identity have in (de)constructing a teacher's credibility to discuss racial identity and racisms in the classroom.

English has a peculiar way of redefining the selves and locations of readers, especially in countries where Anglo-American texts are studied with a multicultural awareness. Ernest Hemingway's “Hills like White Elephants” creates a world elsewhere not only for the couple who travel elsewhere but also for the students who read their story in Kerala (India) when they explore the “elsewheres” they create together as a class by translating it into Malayalam. The student-translators are apt to discover that there is more to Jig's unspoken anguish and the largely unspeakable differences that surface between the two lovers. While Hemingway's lean style is understood for what infinite suggestions it evokes in English, students surprise themselves with meanings—pregnant possibilities that suggest themselves in Malayalam, and unbeknownst to English/monolingual readers. Translation, like the extremely sparse exchanges between Jig and her lover, must exercise extreme caution, however, in committing no more words than must essentially be committed. Concealing what no longer needed concealment, or was soon to be found too big for concealment anyway, is a worrisome theme here whose reflection in translation is hard to sustain unless the Malayali translators match Hemingway's superior command of language. Besides such knowledge, a translator's intertextualities are as invisible as, and perhaps much harder to share with others than, a teacher's challenges and excitement of teaching “Hills” in English in a multilingual classroom. Perhaps from such dreams begin the responsibilities of reading a story as yet unwritten in Hemingway's classic every time we read it elsewhere.

Review Article| October 01 2016 Code-Meshing and African American Literacy Other People's English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy. By Young, Vershawn Ashanti, Barrett, Rusty, Young-Rivera, Y'Shanda, and Lovejoy, Kim Brian. New York: Teachers College Press, 2014. 190 pages. Alexis McGee Alexis McGee Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2016) 16 (3): 577–582. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3600957 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Alexis McGee; Code-Meshing and African American Literacy. Pedagogy 1 October 2016; 16 (3): 577–582. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3600957 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 by Duke University Press2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article offers an innovative pedagogical technique for teaching students to think critically and analytically about race, especially for student populations most accurately characterized as white and middle class. I illustrate this technique by relating my experiences designing and teaching a first-year writing course called the Monstrous and the Human at the University of Delaware. The concept of monstrousness and the problem of race may at first appear unrelated, yet this is precisely the strength of the course, which relies on a method of defamiliarization. Course readings begin by exploring monstrousness in Victorian science fiction novels, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and then shift to a study of how conventions of these novels recur in novels that examine race in American society, such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. In combination with class discussion and course writing assignments, this reading progression invites students to see race from a new perspective. In this article I share my reasons for creating this course, detail its assignments, and show how the course can help students expand their understanding of race in American society. I argue that by teaching race through defamiliarization, we encourage students to arrive at their own understanding of race and racism without inculcating our own beliefs.

This article argues that getting students to learn about archival preservation and research in the context of an underpreserved, underresearched history offers a number of pedagogical rewards. Colleges and universities are pushing to increase community-based learning opportunities for undergraduates. At the same time, digital humanities initiatives are making it increasingly possible for undergraduates to work hands-on with primary sources, and a number of university-sponsored efforts are being made to process and digitize neglected African American archives. Many of these projects make use of graduate student labor, but few have recognized the benefits of engaging undergraduates in processing local and minority archives as part of their classroom experience. This article argues that such classes would not only build mutually beneficial relationships between town and gown but also encourage students to recognize that the approach to history they are familiar with—one that emphasizes national leaders and “major” events—is part of the same tendency to value the powerful that has caused African American history to be underpreserved. Preserving and publicizing local histories counters this tendency and may help produce a younger generation of scholars who are attuned to politics of power and privilege within the scholarship they encounter and produce.

This special issue of Pedagogy , titled “Caring From, Caring Through: Pedagogical Responses to Disability” explores the complex dynamics of disability, pedagogy, and care work and thus augments important scholarship on the personal experiences of disabled teachers, on how mental and physical variation shapes classroom encounters, and on parenting disabled children while inside the academy. Different from these conversations, though, this special issue applies disability theory more explicitly to pedagogical techniques and teaching philosophies. Put another way, the issue outlines pedagogical logics, classroom practices, and ethical considerations that might provoke radical institutional change and that testify to the generative symbiosis of lived disability, disability research/scholarship, and disability content/practices in the classroom. The articles in this issue grow out of authors’ situated, embodied knowledges and experiences of caring from or through disability; contributors contemplate what — and how — caring for/with/through disability has taught them about teaching. At the heart of each of these articles lies the belief that our common humanity is evidenced, paradoxically, through diverse human variation. Questions about how to enact in our lives and classrooms a politics that honors, engages, and conserves that variation — a politics of inclusion, equity, and access — motivate the meditations that follow.

This article explores how the experience of being a caregiver and service provider informs teaching disability studies to students who are also frontline workers in service agencies. I discuss my own history as a service provider and stepparent of an adult with disabilities who has a long history as a service recipient. The history of the City University of New York (CUNY) disability studies program and target student population is reviewed, enabling readers to understand that the approach CUNY takes may be different from that of other programs in the country. The article also describes frustrations students encounter as course readings emphasizing the social construction of disability and the importance of self-determination collide with students' lived experiences of program structures and processes required by regulations and funding sources. Additional sources of tension for students who are frontline workers are the expectations of self-advocates and their parents, and the conflicts in values that may surface when serving a multicultural population in a large urban area. Disability studies courses provide a safe place for students to raise and examine these conflicts in the context of larger disability theory. I utilize my multiple roles and the perspectives they allow to deepen class discussions and offer a more nuanced reflection of disability theory as it is expressed in service praxis.

This essay, focusing on Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s 1930 play and infamous literary collaboration, explores the possibilities of combining new digital tools with traditional scholarly approaches to better understand how the multilayered racial discourse of African American literature in the early twentieth century informs this signal collaboration. Moreover, Christian outlines the benefits of including African American literature in digital humanities projects.

The article outlines the use of contemporary hip-hop lyrics to access the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Lassiter’s essay outlines a strategy for tracing the progression and evolution of African American political and social resistance in literature and music. Furthermore, it offers instructors an opportunity to introduce students to forgotten or overlooked texts of the Harlem Renaissance by exploring the connection between political/social protest and artistic expression.

This article shares tactics for teaching Blu’s Hanging as a text assigned because of its controversy, though not necessarily subsumed by it. The novel is presented so as to grapple with the stakes of ethnic/racial representation alongside careful textual analysis, using the controversy around Yamanaka’s work to “teach the conflicts” of literary studies.

Review Article| October 01 2014 A Cognitive Route to Social Justice: Mark Bracher’s Radical Pedagogies Literature and Social Justice: Protest Novels, Cognitive Politics, and Schema Criticism. By Bracher, Mark. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Eric Leake Eric Leake Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2014) 14 (3): 553–559. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2715850 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Eric Leake; A Cognitive Route to Social Justice: Mark Bracher’s Radical Pedagogies. Pedagogy 1 October 2014; 14 (3): 553–559. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2715850 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2014 by Eric Leake2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Over the last two decades, a growing body of scholarship has examined how whiteness is socially constructed as “objective” and “neutral” in the US and elsewhere. This article seeks to trouble such a position for white teachers in the multiracial classroom, particularly those that focus on multiethnic literatures. Drawing upon scholarship in critical whiteness studies, personal experiences with students, and reflections on multicultural literature, this article advances an educational philosophy of investment wherein privilege and subjectivity are made legible in the learning process. In this model, educators and students work toward the discomfort that often comes from recognizing the risks and rewards of acknowledging one’s positioning within a racial order.

In this article, the author discusses his experiences teaching a class on the Vietnam War, a controversial subject that divided a nation along generational, class, and racial lines. He argues that learning takes place in the encounter of differences — where students consider perspectives, worldviews, and cultures different from their own. As a literature teacher, he claims to use writings by American soldiers and journalists, North and South Vietnamese soldiers, Vietnamese Buddhists, and ethnic American poets in order to have students reflect on the many perspectives on the war, perspectives that may challenge their preconceived notions about Vietnam, likely deriving from family, history, and cultural productions such as Hollywood films. In teaching this class, he discovered that, like his students, his views were interpolated by history, politics, and culture; to teach ethically, he had to reflect on his own subject positions as both an Asian American, who identifies with the struggle of other minorities, and a Cambodian, who must come to terms with his country’s historical tensions with Vietnam. Overall, the article demonstrates the importance of humanities teaching — where students learn, through language, creativity, and the imagination, to reflect on the experiences of other people and become responsible world citizens.

Students can sometimes be resistant to discussing issues of diversity in the English classroom, making it a challenge for instructors to hold honest and enlightening exchanges about race, sexuality, gender, and other facets of human identity. This essay explores various pedagogical strategies the author has successfully employed when teaching texts that highlight diverse perspectives. She focuses specifically on global feminist literature by way of one primary example, the contemporary Australian Aboriginal novel Home by Larissa Behrendt, which highlights the “stolen generations” of Aboriginal and mixed-descent children and the many repercussions of those atrocities on future generations. After providing a brief overview of the novel, she discusses the successful techniques she has utilized in the classroom to help students prepare for and critically analyze this text. These approaches include interrogating the term diversity itself, providing historical and cultural context to the various issues illuminated in the novel, viewing related visual discourses such as film, and crafting writing and discussion assignments for the students to complete both in and out of class. These pedagogical strategies could be useful in any English classroom that focuses on issues of diversity.

In response to the need for additional teacher-research on African American students, this article offers a case study of how one African American student-writer successfully produces expository writing in an Afrocentric first-year writing course at Michigan State University, a large land-grant midwestern research institution.

This article argues that teaching Asian American literature should include immeasurable and nontangible factors that accompany racial grief, such as cultural betrayal, the trauma of belonging interstitially, and the sensation of displacement. I propose that these be introduced via a gothic motif, such as the double, haunting, and possession by ghosts. Such motifs have the advantage of familiarity (or, if not, are quite easy to explain) and being psychoanalytically informed.

This article analyzes classroom discussions of Boaz Yakin's 1994 film Fresh—an unsettling urban drama about a young boy (Fresh) who devises a creative escape from the drug dealers in his environment: he buys a large amount of cocaine that he uses to trick those dealers into thinking that they're all trying to break into each others' markets. In the end, he turns these negative and violent forces against each other and then enters the Witness Protection Program. The social commentary in the film is paramount since it highlights the disturbing cultural reasons why a twelve–year-old African American boy has to devise his own escape from the inner city. Most important, class discussions of (as well as the writing assignments focused on) Yakin's film necessarily confront the role that class hierarchies play in America as well as the cultural myths—like the unconditional individual—that affect many of our expectations and assumptions. Herein resides the film's pedagogical importance: it offers an intensely emotional and intellectual challenge to many of our foundational understandings of American values and cultural narratives. That is, it critiques the problematic rationalizations (like “the just-world phenomenon”) that seek to not only dis-empower but also neglect whole segments of American society.

Courses on ethnic American literature can unintentionally reinscribe students' preconceptions and stereotypes about ethnic American subgroups or create the false impression that each ethnic group is homogeneous. A student with limited experience with people of color might think she now understands an ethnic group after reading an ethnic American novel, for example. By using fiction and non-fiction film, teachers can destabilize students' oversimplified views of ethnic groups and of the concepts of race and ethnicity themselves. The course described here started with Toni Morrison's short story, “Recitatif,” which ingeniously leads readers to examine their own racial preconceptions. Then, novels (Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, Sent for You Yesterday by John Wideman, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen) are paired with films to demonstrate that greater diversity exists within any ethnic group than between any two. Students also engage a few key articles about canon formation so they can understand ethnic literature in the context of American literary traditions. By the end of the course, students have a healthy uncertainty regarding race and ethnicity, their oversimplifications having been undermined by their work with diverse texts.

This article argues small departments are ideal laboratories for innovative structures of collaboration. Beginning with the smallest nit—an individual teacher “collaborating with herself” to mine good ideas from one course to another, and graduating to larger and more ambitious structures of collaboration—team- teaching, service- learning, performance and interdisciplinary syllabi, and courses taught between campuses and across the globe—Moffat shows how deliberate collaboration can yield more from less. Using examples from colleagues' work in small departments at Dickinson College, Moffat suggests how creative collaboration can expand pedagogical methods, increase student diversity and demand for a range of courses, establish interdisciplinary communities, and widen the curriculum.

The article examines the significance of lore in creative writing pedagogy discourse, the problem posed by the historical distinction between teaching craft and drawing out talent in workshops, and the role of social identity as it is rejected, theorized, or ignored in discussions on teaching creative writing. Taking into account students' subjectivity as also constituted by the dynamics of collective identities such as those suggested by the terms gender, race, ethnicity, and so forth, the essay offers examples of workshop strategies that encourage dialogic voicing.

Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind elicited a storm of critical discourse regarding the condition of higher education in the United States. This essay performs a retrospective evaluation of the rhetorical modes that animated that body of discourse, suggesting that the polemical responses offered by Bloom's detractors validate his claims about the contradictory ways that openness, tolerance, and diversity are pursued in the university. Revisiting this controversy provides an opportunity for considering the ethics of the academic polemic.

This article describes specific language experiences of three college writing teachers and the classroom practices that have resulted from these experiences. The authors want to raise awareness of linguistic diversity in writing classes and to help teachers connect with their own language experiences in order to integrate policies and practices that value students' own language varieties.

This essay argues that a pedagogy of “dialogue across differences” should be infused into the core curriculum and function as the link joining multicultural education to service learning. Close examination of student reflections and journal writings reveals how such dialogue can enhance learning, strengthen community partnerships, and enrich antiracist pedagogy.

This essay discusses the history of American literature anthologies from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century; examines their racial and gender inclusions and exclusions; and argues that literary anthologies have played an important role in the production of the American, and more recently multicultural, national narrative.

Cooks describes how she incorporates her personal experience viewing Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, a traveling exhibit from 2000 to 2005, in her art history and ethics studies classes. For the purpose of analysis alone, she divides the photographs into four categories: crowd, crowd with lynching victim(s), lynching victim(s) alone, and souvenirs. Students respond in speechless and somber disbelief when confronted with the shameless desire to document and openly celebrate the destruction of the human body. However, the lynching photographs (four of which are included in the essay) are a catalyst for a complex system of varied responses beyond the immediate paralyzing effect. The history of lynching and the continued threat of racial violence are difficult subjects to teach, but the engagement with this history through lynching imagery and the exhibition history of Without Sanctuary has proven to be an important life experience for both Cooks and her students.

Research Article| April 01 2005 Uncommon Ground: Narcissistic Reading and Material Racism Barbara Schneider Barbara Schneider Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2005) 5 (2): 195–212. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-2-195 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Barbara Schneider; Uncommon Ground: Narcissistic Reading and Material Racism. Pedagogy 1 April 2005; 5 (2): 195–212. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-2-195 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2005 Duke University Press2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

In the spring of 2000, following the completion of a Ph.D. specializing in rhetoric and composition, I taught my first literature course: a writing-intensive survey of African American literature. The course, open to all students, regardless of major, used both traditional literature assignments, such as close readings, and more rhetorical assignments that asked the students to “join a conversation” on issues such as gender relations and African American education. After years of teaching argument in rhetoric and composition courses, I was excited about bringing some of the methods that had proved successful in this environment to the literature curriculum: peer review, audience analysis, guidance through the writing process, intensive revision, writing conferences. These were elements of writing instruction that I felt had been missing from my own undergraduate study in English literature, and I was eager to share them with my students. I envisioned transforming the lower-level writing course in literature by guiding students through the writing process and encouraging them to think of their writing in terms of the impact it would have on specific readers. The result was a disaster. Strategies that had elicited thoughtful revision from my rhetoric students fell flat in the literature classroom. For instance, I had had wonderful success with a peer review technique developed by Barbara Sitko (1993) in which students read a peer’s paper aloud and paused at the end of every sentence to summarize the main point of the essay and to predict what would appear next. My composition students had found this

Research Article| April 01 2003 Postpositivist Realism in the Multicultural Writing Classroom: Beyond the Paralysis of Cultural Relativism Laurie Grobman Laurie Grobman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2003) 3 (2): 205–226. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-2-205 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Laurie Grobman; Postpositivist Realism in the Multicultural Writing Classroom: Beyond the Paralysis of Cultural Relativism. Pedagogy 1 April 2003; 3 (2): 205–226. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-2-205 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2003 Duke University Press2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

One of the many significant points made in Teaching the Literatures of Early America is that students often resist the nuances of early American texts, and for similar psychological or ideological reasons they are reluctant to link the themes to our own time. I met this resistance early in an American survey, at a Florida university, when attempting to direct the class’s examination of sixteenthand seventeenth-century colonialism to the World Conference on Racism, then unraveling in Durban, South Africa. I had photocopied and distributed to the class a newspaper article about the United States and Israel’s abandonment of the U.N. meeting. The article explained why Israel had rejected the label of a “colonialist” state, and it suggested through the Palestinian ambassador, Salman el Herfi, that the American delegation had left because it wanted to avoid discussing slavery and the injustices done to native peoples. The thematic interests and chronological structure of the course invited this brief digression. We were moving forward through time and addressing the same questions: What is a colonialist state, and what are the traits of colonial culture? What are the aesthetics of denial, when power is asserted and contested on an international stage? My strategy to this point had been to complicate the “colonialist” label by offering different versions of the encounter it implies. A comparison of Spanish, French, English, and indigenous texts was to foreground how “new worlds” were imagined and understood. The newspaper article, I thought, would cap off the week’s reading and use current events to suggest how the legacies of empire were with us still. For the Tuesday meeting I had assigned selections from the Puritan captive Mary Rowlandson, a staple of American survey courses. The students divided into small groups and, with little supervision, identified where a woman’s experiences on the frontier potentially challenged ecclesiastical authority. The reading assigned for the following Thursday was an English translation of the Nican mopohua, a Nahuatl account of the Virgin of Guadalupe written about the time of the Puritan narrative. To my mind, the two works yielded a striking contrast. Both defined religious experience through gender and the meeting of cultures, but where

Research Article| January 01 2001 Cutting Class in the Multicultural Literature Classroom Vivyan C. Adair; Vivyan C. Adair Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Sandra L. Dahlberg Sandra L. Dahlberg Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2001) 1 (1): 173–175. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-1-173 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Vivyan C. Adair, Sandra L. Dahlberg; Cutting Class in the Multicultural Literature Classroom. Pedagogy 1 January 2001; 1 (1): 173–175. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-1-173 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2001 Duke University Press2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.