So this is my attempt to do those things.
In 2016 I wrote a Tweet, then a Google Doc, then a wiki, now a blog, about "How to Grad School While Poor." It was meant to be a crowd sourced resource. For the most part it has been helpful to folks. But I got called out almost immediately for identifying as "white trash" in the description paragraph for what the document was and how I hoped it would help. I was initially resistant to the Women of Color who emailed me to correct me, and then I was defensive. And then I sat with it. This was the start.
Like many now, I started with a reading list:
- Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in American (2017)
- Ta-Nehisi Coates' We Were Eight Years in Power (2017) and Between the World and Me (2015)
- Matthew Demond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016)
- Matt Wray's Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (2006)
- Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness (2010)
- Robin Diangelo's White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (2018)
I also used social media, following people, organizations, voices, I would not normally encounter but needed to hear. The most impactful was #DisruptTexts
I always work with things as soon as I know better, so my high school students started hearing about these topics explicitly, and we read these texts in class. I bought, and got donated, YA and other books where my students could see themselves in. These titles are easy to find by Googling, and buying a few at a time, setting lit circles for them is easy. I also found that it's not hard to share wishlists and get people to donate a copy here or there.
I did find at this start that I hit two cognitive speed bumps which I won't snitch tag but will talk about. A very popular group that advocates for representative books and reading when called out/in about a problematic stance did the opposite of what I had come to expect, and instead of admitting wrong and doing better, claimed they hadn't done anything wrong, blocked, and ignored further comments. The other was an author of what I thought was a good book for educators, getting them to see their Black students in the classroom. But the book uses "tribe" and the author will not mea culpa and move on, do better. I was confused that folks dedicated to social justice and representation would do this. I recognize now that it's all complicated. I choose not to follow and support these folks, but understand why some still support their voices. I write this out only to say that there is no perfect here, and intent matters, and does not negate impact. I've seen a lot of trash edu celebrities lash out and check out when asked about problematic crap (and it's almost always framed as a way for them to learn and do better). There is nothing wrong with saying I messed up, I see that, I'll do better.
I teach at an HBCU and knew I wanted to keep that in mind as I designed by British Literature I survey and Shakespeare class. I chose texts that I felt talked about race, we talked about how race was seen, especially in the survey we talked about the artificial constructs that racists made and used, and I made sure that we read Scholars of Color.
This past spring I taught a Gender and Lit course. It was not my field, I do folklore, popular culture, medieval and early modern, but I was excited about the course at the same time that I knew it was out of my field and I'd have to do my homework. I knew I wanted to teach Black authors, that I wanted to theme it around whose story gets told, and who determines that, and voice, and agency. So on day one I spent class telling the students how I designed the class, why, what themes I wanted to focus on, and why, and explained it was not my expertise and I was going to screw up at some point, and I'd figure it out, and we'd go forward. I was also explicit with them that I was using anti-racist pedagogy to guide my work, and #DisruptTexts. The class really worked. But it would not have worked without me doing the work.
Like wise, this fall, I am teaching World Literature I, a Young Adult Literature, and Intro to English Studies classes. When I designed them I first wanted to apply the lessons I had learned. I wanted to decenter whiteness and tell a more accurate, representative narrative. I also wanted, especially in the YA and Intro classes, to give the students a clear overview of the ideas, the scholars, the conversations in the field, many of which are centered on race.
For me, designing these courses came down to some simply steps to implement in your classes:
- What primary texts did you choose?
- My guide here is always “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books. (Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop 1990).”
- One of the reasons why it is so important for my students to see themselves in what we read is because do many of them never have. A common argument against representative teaching and reading is that it's an agenda to never teach white authors. And it's not. This is why I prefer representative over diversity because too often diversity is seen as a box to check- I assigned Maxine Hong Kingston's The Warrior Woman, I'm done. Representative texts on the other hand seek to teach literature that reflects the world. To me that means an accurate representation but it also means in its correct historical context, accurately, not the whitewashed version taught in K-12.
- What secondary texts and scholars are you reading?
- I've started to post a picture of the scholars I teach when I post the link to their articles and books and blogs on my class notes. I want students to SEE the scholars we study.
- I also have made a concerted effort to make sure that the scholars we read are BIPOC and queer, and speak specifically to issues within their academic work.
- What topics and ideas and history are you teaching?
- I always teach my literature in its historical context. Literature, as with popular culture, is always a representation of its historical and cultural moment. Therefore it is impossible to teach these texts accurately without teaching the context. One of the issues with continuing to teach some of these texts, of teaching the traditional canon, is that only the literature is taught, it is totally divorced from the context.
- What conversations do you make room for?
- This may be the scariest for educators. Your students may say things that are hard for you to hear. They may say things that you have a negative reaction to. You have to be prepared to give the students these spaces, this time, you have to let them have these conversations. This means letting go of control of your classroom. It also means that you need to build in supports and structures for your students to step away, skip class, walk out, and take breaks as they work through these issues and deal with these truths.
In my experience, these changes, these moves, are easy to start doing. But these are not one and done things. You have to continuously read, listen, learn, and improve how you are serving your students, the content you are teaching. The changes with my high school students were a great start, but I didn't fill my class bookshelves with representative texts and call it done. It was a start, that led me to opening my class to center students and the conversations they wanted and needed to have. Then I used this to explicitly talk about race, and history, and specific issues. Without all of this work, every day, showing up, changing, messing up, I would not have been able to tailor my classes at the college level. Without experimenting with what this looked like in higher ed, I would not have been able to create and teach my Gender and Lit class, and without that I would not be able to teach my classes this fall.
Every semester I am making changes based on listening to new conversations, reading new books, and trying new things. To me this is what the work requires, changing and learning all the time. My classes are not perfect. They are not model examples. But they don't have to be. They DO have to be better than they were the day, week, semester before.
If teachers are willing to do the work I do think these things are easy to start with. It's hard to keep up, it's hard to keep going, but it's great work, it's necessary work. And it is ongoing.
This spring I'm teaching Shakespeare, and rather than teach something similar to what I taught this past fall I've decided to teach it as Shakespeare: Race and Adaptation. I am going to teach King Lear with James Earl Jones. We're going to look at Djimon Hounsou as Caliban in The Tempest. We're going to look at Vanessa I. Corredera's "Get Out and the Remediation of Othello's Sunken Place: Beholding White Supremacy's Coagula." We're going to look at Star Crossed. We're going to read Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America by Ayanna Thompson. We're going to read Amiri Baraka's conversations about Shakespare. We're going to use the Globe's anti-racist Shakespeare, we're going to look at the work adaptation does, what the revisions and reimagings do.
I have a running document of "future class ideas" that when a great article or blog from a Scholar of Color comes across my feed I just paste it on that document, so this fall when I plan out my Shakespeare class I have all these resources in one place so I can plan. I think this class will be great, I think it will reflect the most current conversations in the field, and that the students can engage with.
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