[As another
semester comes to a close, I wanted to spend the week reflecting on some
complex moments and questions related to Teaching under Trump (trademark
AmericanStudier!). I’d love to hear your thoughts, on these or any of your own
teaching or semester reflections, in comments!]
On three benefits
for life in Trump’s America from my semester’s three adult learning courses.
1)
Historical Knowledge: My first class for Assumption
College’s Worcester Institute for Senior Education (WISE) program was at
once the most historically focused and yet the most overtly connected to our
own moment of the three courses I’m highlighting here. That is, I believe that the
course’s central focus on Expanding Our Collective Memories, on presenting five
particular histories that we need to better remember, had a lot to offer our 21st
century conversations and narratives. To cite one example, for the first class
I highlighted a series of forgotten Revolutionary era histories, from early feminist authors
and activists to African American slave
writers and figures to the period’s Moroccan
Muslim American community in Charleston. These figures, texts, and
histories are of course well worth remembering for their own sake, but they
also and crucially shift our sense of the Revolution and America’s founding,
reminding us that such cultures and communities have been integral and vital
parts of our national identity and community since its origin points.
2)
Cultural Contexts: My first
class for Brandeis University’s BOLLI
program was much more literary in emphasis, focusing on creative works by pairs
of American authors from shared or similar cultural backgrounds (one more
historical and one current). But each and every one of those authors and pairs
of course had something meaningful to offer for 21st century American
conversations and culture, and I would highlight in particular the two novels
on which our middle three weeks of discussion focused: Charles Chesnutt’s
The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
and David
Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981). I wrote in my
preview post about my excitement at teaching that pairing (as well as
Bradley’s novel at all) for the first time, and the class and conversations
didn’t disappoint. We stayed closely focused on both of those wonderful novels
for much of our time, of course, but we nonetheless also linked them to a wide
and deep variety of contemporary issues, from police brutality and the anthem
protests to the resurgence of white supremacy and debates over American
identity (among many others). I’ve long believed that Chesnutt’s book should be
required
reading for all Americans, and after this experience I might just have to
add Bradley’s into the mix as well.
3)
Communal Conversations: My I’ve-lost-track-of-what-number
class for Fitchburg State’s ALFA program had
no central theme or question; we just read and discussed ten great short
stories from the Best
American Short Stories 2016 anthology. As a result, while a few of the
stories connected to one or another specific issue in Trump’s America, most did
not do so in any particular way, and most of our conversations thus focused on
the stories themselves as well as various contexts far beyond 2017. And yet I
would nonetheless argue that these conversations offered a vital experience for
living in and surviving the age of Trump: the chance to be part of and share
thoughts and ideas with a community of interesting, engaged, intelligent, empathetic
fellow Americans and humans. The horrors of our current moment can feel not
only crushing but isolating, as of course can various features of our social
media and technological worlds. So I’m not sure there’s anything we can do
more consistently and crucially to combat those effects than to find and
treasure such communities. Every adult learning class I’ve ever taught has
offered one for me, which is why I keep coming back to these wonderful
programs.
Last reflection
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Fall reflections you’d share?
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