[ Education is struggle. Of the books under review, one shows
community college students pioneering reading methods and expanding
canons that came late to the Ivies. The second looks at a key figure
in the African American intellectual tradition.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

CLASS AND INEQUALITY: THE CLASSROOM IN CRISIS  
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Victoria Baena
September 13, 2021
Boston Review
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_ Education is struggle. Of the books under review, one shows
community college students pioneering reading methods and expanding
canons that came late to the Ivies. The second looks at a key figure
in the African American intellectual tradition. _

Flickr,

 

On today’s university campuses, the language of
“student-centered” learning and “horizontal” pedagogy is all
the rage. Unfortunately, what began as a powerful tradition of
critical practice—in the work of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Audre
Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others—often gets diluted into the
hegemony of teaching evaluations and administrative overreach of our
current academic landscape. Such language ignores that
there _are _power asymmetries within classrooms and around them:
merely asserting that school is an equitable space does not make it
so. Nor does it help us understand what does make for a good teacher,
or what role the classroom has played in shaping broader institutional
histories. At this moment of ferocious contestation over the meaning
of the classroom, we might a closer look at what actually goes on
there.

Those who proclaim the humanities to be dead have been looking in all
the wrong places.

Two recent books contribute to this effort, taking seriously not only
the content but also the form of the varieties of pedagogical
encounter. _The Teaching Archive, _by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura
Heffernan, proposes a new disciplinary history of English studies
through the teaching practices of some of its most storied
scholars. _Fugitive Pedagogy, _by Jarvis R. Givens, takes the case
of historian and “father of black history” Carter G. Woodson as a
prism to uncover a dissenting tradition of American learning, in the
history, theory, and practice of black educators_. _These books
emerge from distinct disciplinary contexts, and their arguments are
largely keyed to those audiences: Buurma and Heffernan are in English
departments, while Givens is based at Harvard’s Graduate School of
Education. But in their own way, each of these carefully researched
and compellingly argued texts raises urgent questions about the ethics
and politics of pedagogy, as they confront the complex entanglements
of learning, desire, inequity, and liberation that inform what happens
in the classroom.

One implication of this work can be drawn upfront. In making a case
for the centrality of teaching to literary and historical study, these
studies counter all too familiar doom-and-gloom jeremiads on the death
of the humanities, which Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon characterize in
their own new book
[[link removed]] as
a discourse of “permanent crisis.” _The Teaching
Archive _and _Fugitive Pedagogy_ shift the focus of this
conversation from academic journals, professional conferences, and
culture wars op-eds to the actually existing spaces of teaching and
learning. Their wager is that new histories of the classroom might not
only free scholars from persistent (and persistently unsatisfying)
quarrels over critical methods or disciplinary _raisons
d’être_ but also from the tired debates that Reitter and Wellmon
diagnose. In short, those who proclaim the humanities to be dead have
been looking in all the wrong places. These books exhort us to see
scholarship and pedagogy as part of a shared endeavor rather than as
siloed components with teaching one on side and research on the other.
In doing so, they also remind us that the classroom is not an
inherently liberatory space; it has always been an arena for broader
conflicts and struggles over who has access to knowledge and to what
ends learning is put.

 
 
The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study
[[link removed]]
By Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan
University of Chicago Press; 320 pages
December 4, 2020
Hardcover:  $95.00; Paperback:  $30.00
ISBN: 9780226735948 
ISBN: 9780226736136

 

University of Chicago Press
Any attempt to center the classroom in discussions of the history of
learning faces a major obstacle from the outset: the relatively
tenuous nature of the “teaching archive.” Givens, for example,
describes how the scarcity of material on Black teachers and students
led him to assemble a “patchwork of sources,” from school records
and oral histories to the personal papers of prominent educators.
Buurma and Heffernan portray a somewhat different problem among modern
Anglo-American scholars: while their published work has often gone
through years of careful study and peer review, their teaching records
might be described, in contrast, as “the often-embarrassing remnants
of a process undertaken almost always under less-than-ideal
conditions.”  Yet this ephemerality also indexes the extent to
which teaching is devalued in scholarly work. As Michel Trouillot
[[link removed]] and Saidiya
Hartman
[[link removed]] have
taught us, the silences of the archive can reveal as much as what has
been preserved. _The Teaching Archive_ asks us to imagine a world
where we “we collectively valued teaching enough to treat teaching
materials—notes, syllabuses, exams—as worth preserving,
circulating, sharing, and citing.”

For one thing, such a world might foster a more capacious sense of the
history of literary study, long distorted by a myopic focus on the Ivy
League and by a received narrative “of clashes and compromises
between humanist pedagogues and philologist scholars.” Over seven
chapters, _The Teaching Archive _collects and comments on archival
materials of nine influential scholar-teachers: Caroline Spurgeon, T.
S. Eliot, I. A. Richards and Edith Rickert, J. Saunders Redding,
Cleanth Brooks and Edmund Wilson, Josephine Miles, and Simon J. Ortiz.
The book shows how their scholarship was rooted in and deeply shaped
by classroom experience, proposing “a new way of seeing the outcomes
of teaching.” These syllabi, reading lists, lecture notes, and exam
copies, Buurma and Heffernan argue, tell us something important about
the material basis of literature—giving us “an account of how it
was made, and by whom, and under what shaping, but not determinative,
conditions.”

Spurgeon, for instance, is remembered in Renaissance studies today as
the author of _Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells
Us _(1935)_, _an exhaustive catalog of the bard’s metaphors and an
analysis of what they reveal about his material world, but Buurma and
Heffernan reveal how deeply indebted this project was to Spurgeon’s
larger pedagogical practice. An extension school instructor and the
head of English Literature at a women’s college, Spurgeon designed a
course called “The Art of Reading_,_” which taught research and
writing methods to students by asking them to take active notes on
slips “in order to secure order + convenience of ref.” As she
recorded in her lecture notes, “You can arrange them + shuffle them
+ sort them as you never can entries on a notebook or on a sheet of
paper. Have them all the same size. Card or paper.” Between
documenting the author’s perspective, and “tabulating your own
views, + working towards various lines of investigation,” students
 could eventually create their own index to a scholarly work. Some
critics would later dismiss _Shakespeare’s Imagery _as a mere
reference dictionary. But beyond generating an essential scholarly
resource, the task of cataloguing and indexing allowed even new
college students to take part in the production of scholarly
knowledge. Along the way, Spurgeon helped them see reading not as
passive consumption but as an active process of reflection and
curation.

New histories of the classroom might free scholars from persistent
(and persistently unsatisfying) quarrels over critical methods.

This attention to collaboration continues in chapters on I. A.
Richards, Edith Rickert, and Josephine Miles, all of whom saw the
classroom as a kind of laboratory for experiments in reading
techniques. For instance, Richards’s “Practical Criticism”
lectures—which exposed students’ flailing attempts at poetic
interpretation—might better be understood as “experiments in
collective reading” that would eventually help readers improve.
Rickert’s _New Methods for the Study of Literature _(1927) paid
explicit homage to her students in a contemporary literature course
who helped her work out methods on analyzing rhythm and imagery. And
as Josephine Miles’s freshman composition course at Berkeley,
English 1a, deployed the “grammatical sentence—rather than the
poetic line, poetic genres, figures, or images”—as a vehicle to
grasp literary change over time, the sentence became the key unit of
analysis, too, for Miles’s foundational research in what we now know
as the digital humanities. In Spurgeon’s case, such collaborations
also led her to gently puncture Shakespeare’s aura of canonicity in
her own scholarship, as she encouraged readers to “see the very
ordinary origins of the works they often encountered as sacrosanct and
mystified.”

Received histories of the “canon wars” of the 1980s and 1990s are
another target for Buurma and Heffernan’s revisionist narrative.
John Guillory’s influential book _Cultural Capital: The Problem of
Literary Canon Formation _(1993) argued that quarrels over the
“dead white men” of traditional curricula were misguided: in
conflating representativeness on a syllabus with representation in
political life, Guillory contended, they ignored the university’s
real function of social reproduction and entrenchment of class
divisions, no matter which authors were taught in its departments.
Buurma and Heffernan do not so much reject Guillory’s account as
uncover a longer history of these ideological debates. For instance,
T. S. Eliot has a crucial place in Guillory’s disciplinary history:
Eliot’s focus on a new “minor canon” of early modern dramatists
and poets in works like _The Sacred Wood _(1920) helped to produce a
standard way of reading that focused on literary form and technique
alone. But Buurma and Heffernan show how that volume arose from
Eliot’s experiences teaching Modern English Literature to extension
school students through the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA).
Eliot modified his syllabus year after year based on the desires and
responses from his adult working-class students, especially by moving
away from single-author classes to ones structured around a topic like
“Socialism in Literature” or “The Celtic Revival.”

Here and elsewhere, then, _The Teaching Archive _argues that “the
canon” has long been subject to contestation, revision, and debate.
Other chapters trace how teachers throughout the twentieth century
sought pragmatic responses to Guillory’s critique, as they engaged
with indigenous students, immigrants, and students of color who
expressed alienation from a curriculum clearly not fashioned with them
in mind. One such teacher is Acoma Pueblo professor and activist Simon
J. Ortiz, whose 1981 essay “Towards a national Indian literature:
Cultural authenticity in nationalism” remains a crucial text in
Native and indigenous studies. Ortiz taught a Native American
literature class at the public community College of Marin as a
historical survey course and revised his syllabus multiple times over
the course of his career, structuring each week’s readings to
juxtapose distinct historical moments and literary genres. Such
changes “drew students’ attention to historical discontinuities
and identifications across time,” Buurma and Heffernan explain,
while allowing Ortiz and his students to think through the
relationship between Native American oral traditions and print
writing. And it countered a notion of contemporary Native literature
as derivative or belated, which could inadvertently result from a
chronological survey. Likewise, J. Saunders Redding, the first Black
faculty member in the Ivy League, who also taught at historically
Black colleges in the Jim Crow South, is shown redesigning his
American literature course as a historical survey in reverse.
Beginning with contemporary African American writers and moving back
in time to the colonial period, Redding’s reading lists and syllabi
figured American literature “as a body of writing fundamentally
shaped by politics and history.”

In 2012, an earlier version
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chapter on Cleanth Brooks and Edmund Wilson was published amid
then-vibrant discussions on disciplinary ways of reading, from Rita
Felski’s critique
[[link removed]] of
the hermeneutics of suspicion to Stephen Best and Sharon
Marcus’s case
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“surface reading.” Echoing Eve Sedgwick’s call
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“reparative reading” in place of “paranoid reading,” the 2012
article proposed a “reparative disciplinary history” located in
the classroom. Almost a decade later, the revised chapter reads less
as an intervention against the new formalisms than as a circumvention
of the formalism versus historicism debate as such. Following
Brooks’s papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library, the authors trace how
the formalist emphasis of mid-twentieth-century New Criticism emerged
less from first principles than from the realities of the classroom,
where a text might be understood as a self-contained, autonomous
whole. In the vagaries of day-to-day discussions, Brooks was less
programmatic: in discussing Hart Crane’s _The Bridge_ with
students, for instance, he asked “to look at some particular
passages with you, talk about them, the texture of them, the quality
of them, and postpone a bit the matter of the total meaning of the
poem and the way the parts are held together.” Having historicized
Brooks’s formalism, the chapter turns to Wilson, the consummate
historicist, whose classroom handouts catalogued examples of literary
representation—such as how Shelley, Pope, Auden, and Yeats all
depicted “objects reflected in water.” Wilson’s attempt to
“reconnect canonical literature to the world,” the authors
suggest, can be understood as a theory of literature in its own right.
Tracing how methodological debates have played out in practice—not
as manifestoes but as pragmatic, provisional solutions to the question
of how to read, and how to learn—Buurma and Heffernan suggest that
such attention might allow scholars, as they put it in the original
article, to “evade the deadening impasse of disciplinary
autocritique.”

Refreshingly, however, _The Teaching Archive _also rejects the idea
that English professors need only find a new method in order to
counter declining enrollments, defunded departments, and the precarity
of academic employment. As the adjunct protagonist of Christine
Smallwood’s recent novel
[[link removed]] reflects,
“how naïve she had once been to believe there was anything
glamorous about the life of the mind.” The teaching loads of
contingent faculty, who now account for at least 70 percent
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the academic labor force, afford little time to engage in the kind of
research that would “count” for tenure—if they could land a rare
tenure-track job in the first place. Buurma and Heffernan thus end by
suggesting that yoking our understanding of literary history to the
history of teaching might lead us to give greater credit—both in our
grasp of the history, and concretely, on tenure committees and at
administrative checkpoints—for the ways scholarly advances have long
taken place.

[section separator]

While _The Teaching Archive _historicizes contemporary method wars,
Givens offers a more radical rethinking of the space of the classroom,
uncovering a cast of characters whose teaching methods and development
of historical counternarratives were long seen as a threat to racial
oppression. As he put it in a recent essay
[[link removed]],
“Historical study of Black teaching reveals that antiracist pedagogy
and practice is not new.” In this longer history of conflict and
resistance, learning might be—because, for many Black teachers and
students, it has long been—an authentic “means of escape.”

Such were the words of Black educator, historian, and theorist Carter
G. Woodson. _Fugitive Pedagogy _began its life as a doctoral
dissertation on Woodson, most commonly remembered today as the founder
of Negro History Week, the precursor of Black History Month. Givens
recovers his reputation as an important scholar and teacher in his own
right. Alain Locke once said that Woodson’s 1922 _The Negro in Our
History_, which placed black Americans firmly at the center of U.S.
history, was among “that select class of books that have brought
about a revolution of mind.” As a theorist of education, Woodson’s
1933 _The Mis-Education of the Negro _proved a foundational text in
exposing how the structure and content of the U.S. school curriculum
entrenched anti-blackness in generation after generation of students.

 
Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching
By Jarvis R. Givens
Harvard University Press; 320 pages
April 13, 2021
Hardcover:  $35.00
ISBN 9780674983687
[link removed]
[[link removed]]

Harvard University Press
Through all his writing, Givens shows, Woodson remained a teacher
above all. Educated early on by uncles who had been enslaved, Woodson
would go on to study at Berea College, Lincoln University, the
University of Chicago, the Sorbonne, and Harvard. At Harvard he
completed his history PhD in 1912 at the age of thirty-seven—only
the second African American to do so, after W. E. B. Du Bois—in a
field still largely working under the assumptions of William A.
Dunning’s unabashedly racist version of U.S. history, which, among
other things, blamed the failure of Reconstruction on unqualified
freedmen. Woodson would later write that it took him “twenty years
to recover” from his time at Harvard. Meanwhile, he also taught
French, English, and history at various public schools, as well as
serving as a principal in West Virginia and Washington, D.C.

While John Dewey stressed horizontal teacher-student relationships,
Black educators like Woodson tended to put educational content—a new
history of Black life—before pedagogical process.

_Fugitive Pedagogy_ situates Woodson’s life within a larger set of
practices and longer tradition: what Givens calls a
“counterhistorical narrative and way of knowing.” The chapters
move back and forward in history and between Woodson’s biography and
broader social contexts. There are sections on Black educational
institutions from the era of Reconstruction to the mid-twentieth
century; on Woodson’s own variegated experiences as educator; and on
the institution of Black studies as a university discipline in the
wake of the 1960s. A crucial point of reference for Givens is the
too-brief utopian moment of Reconstruction when, as Du
Bois’s _Black Reconstruction _emphasized, the Freedmen’s Bureau
not only promoted political and economic causes but also built schools
and hired schoolteachers throughout the South. Many formerly enslaved
people conceived of literacy as key to their intellectual as well as
physical emancipation.

This vision proved tragically fleeting. Variously constrained or
actively suppressed, Black education nonetheless continued, its
teachers’ and students’ persistence confirming that Black study
did indeed threaten the dominant social order. Among Woodson’s most
formative experiences was teaching adults amid the coal mines of
Fayette County, West Virginia, where he learned to think of literacy
as a “social act at the center of black political struggle.”
Woodson too ultimately broke away from formal institutions of
learning, but his secondary school teaching continued to inform his
activism and research agenda. These experiences convinced him,
according to Givens, that “addressing the material conditions of
black life required upending black people’s condemnation in the
symbolic order.”

In a footnote, Buurma and Heffernan acknowledge that their focus on
higher education is “only a part of the story,” one that needs
supplementing in “the history of the interrelations between primary,
secondary, and tertiary education.” Givens offers a more continuous
vision of how education has been theorized and practiced from primary
to post-secondary levels. As the leader of the Association for the
Study of Negro Learning and History (ASNLH), for instance, Woodson
grew frustrated at having to appeal to white funders for legitimacy
and research funding, while also acquiescing to their parameters for
research. Instead he came to stress the importance of black
teachers’ associations “as a space for teachers to engage with new
ideas, emerging research about black life, and political demands of
the day.” The ASNLH supported local scholars in promoting teaching
and study in schools and communities on a local level—rather than in
universities, where everyday study elevated whiteness through the
“debasement of black students and black achievement.”

One of Givens’s revisionist moves is to disentangle Woodson from the
context of the (white) progressive education movement in which he has
often been placed. While thinkers like John Dewey stressed communal
values and horizontal teacher-student relationships, Woodson tended to
put educational content before pedagogical process: contextual
learning and communal pedagogy might be insufficient, he argued, if
Black students came to education shaped by myths of racial
inferiority. Instead, Woodson and other educators focused on devising
an alternative curriculum, including textbooks, classroom tools,
traditions, and celebrations meant to tell a new history of black
life: neither one of unending subjugation, nor an inevitable march
toward greater progress, but rather a story that centered historical
conflicts and struggles in which students might find inspiring models.

What does Givens mean by conceiving of Black education and educational
theory as “a fugitive project from its inception”? Like _The
Teaching Archive, _the book unfolds through paradigmatic scenes of
reading, beginning with its opening act. In rural Webster Parish,
Louisiana, in 1933, a 28-year-old secondary school teacher named
Tessie McGee reads aloud passages from _The Negro in Our History _to
her students. She does so furtively_, _however, with Woodson’s book
hidden on her lap and the officially sanctioned Jim Crow-era outline
open on her desk, in case administrators should enter
un-announced. _Fugitive Pedagogy_ shows how such “covert”
practices of literacy and learning equipped both students and teachers
with a way of refusing “the narrative condemnation of black life
facilitated by Louisiana’s official curriculum.”

In a similar vein, a chapter on the “fugitive slave as a folk
hero” places Woodson’s textbooks within a longer genealogy,
stemming back to the first textbooks written by black Americans—then
fugitive slaves. As departments and disciplines today scramble to
decolonize their curriculum, Givens illuminates a longstanding
counter-canon in predominantly black schools and colleges, where, for
instance, the Haitian revolutionary figures Toussaint L’Ouverture
and Jean-Jacques Dessalines were key protagonists within the
curriculum. A particularly enlightening section situates Woodson’s
work within a diasporic and anti-imperialist framework, linking his
theories to those of (Jamaican) Sylvia Wynter, (Martinican) Aimé
Césaire, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. This context embeds Black
educators within a broader Black radical tradition, as well as within
the history of critical pedagogy.

As Givens shows, these decades of Black pedagogy fed into “what
became Black Studies” in the 1960s and afterward. Between its
critique of dominant historical narratives, its establishment of a new
curriculum and its fostering of intellectual networks, the ASNLH paved
the way for the institutionalization of Black Studies in universities.
In turn, activists and scholars such as Angela Davis, bell hooks,
Hortense Spillers—among many others—traced their intellectual
growth to what they learned from their Black teachers. Givens takes
care to include the voices of these students as well as their
professors. Davis, for instance, recalled her own projects and notes
in learning about Negro History Week, which celebrated the
“firsts” in Black history: “But I remember that it was always
assumed that if there could be a first, then there could be a second,
and then there would be a third, and so on , and so on, and so on.”

[section separator]

Despite their divergences, both of these books stress continuity over
change in the course of our educational institutions, taking a page
from recent radical critiques from critical university studies. As
scholars such as Roderick Ferguson
[[link removed]], Craig
S. Wilder [[link removed]],
and Charisse Burden-Stelly
[[link removed]] have
forcefully argued, universities’ diversity and inclusion efforts
have proven quite compatible with neoliberal business as usual:
skyrocketing tuition, faculty disempowerment, expanding
adjunctification and administrative bloat (and now, with COVID-19,
direct threats to health). Greater access for women and students of
color, meanwhile, has only hastened the privatization of higher
education and the student debt crisis, reinforcing oppressive links
among university, state, and capital.

Given this dismal state of affairs, what do we gain from these
revisionist histories of teaching and learning? For one thing,
both _The Teaching Archive _and _Fugitive Pedagogy _challenge us
to think more flexibly about where learning has taken place, and where
it might: in adult education classes, union halls, reading groups, and
prisons, not just in lecture halls, seminar rooms, or on Zoom.

Teaching and learning are social relations that cannot be isolated
from the political, historical, and institutional forces that shape
them.

Indeed, at some level they invite us to ask whether so many of our
formal educational institutions have a right to exist at all.
According to Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s influential book _The
Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study_
[[link removed]] (2013)_, _the
only justifiable relation to the university today is to be “in but
not of” it: “one can only sneak into the university and steal what
one can.” This use of the term “fugitivity” is in line with a
long Black intellectual tradition, theorized in recent years by
scholars like Saidiya Hartman, Steven Best, and Christina Sharpe, and
understood as a mobile position from which one can know otherwise
(without either foregrounding state repression or idealizing the
freedom of escape). Givens concludes _Fugitive Pedagogy _by
acknowledging his debt to Moten and Harney, situating their
undercommons within a longer tradition of “fugitive planning and
black study” that he has unearthed. Buurma and Heffernan, too,
briefly appeal to the undercommons, glossing it as “the imagined
collective of the contingently employed teachers, teaching assistants,
instructors, university staff, and indebted students who have also
helped make those major works.”

And yet neither _The Teaching Archive _nor _Fugitive
Pedagogy _wants to entirely give up on the institution of the
university. The protagonists of _The Teaching Archive_, after all,
are hardly exemplars of abolitionist pedagogy; they often rested
comfortably in their position in and around compromised, powerful
institutions. Like Woodson himself, though, they kept their students
in view, using their position to fight for improving the intellectual
and material position of those they taught.

It is tempting to pare down pedagogy to the instance of a particular
encounter: teachers and students, sharing a particular space,
grappling with new ideas and difficult texts. But as these books make
clear, the practices of teaching and learning are social
relations—the classroom a social space—that cannot be isolated
from the political, historical, and institutional forces that shape
them. The traditions uncovered by each of these books ask us to do a
better job of recognizing such collective practices wherever they have
historically appeared—including where we might not think to look. By
equipping us with a more diverse vision of our pedagogical pasts, they
invite us to do justice to the best of those traditions, and to work
toward building (or rebuilding) more just alternatives.

_[Essayist VICTORIA BAENA is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature
at Yale University. Her research focuses on the novel between realism
and modernism across Europe and Latin America.]_
.
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