[This past
weekend was the 2018
Northeast MLA convention in Pittsburgh. It was a great time as usual, and
this week I’ll highlight some standout moments and conversations. Leading up to
a weekend post on how you can get involved in this great organization!]
On two
impressive roundtables that offered distinct but intertwined visions of
teaching in 2018 America.
For my Fall
2017 Semester Reflections series, I focused on various factors under the umbrella
heading of “Teaching under Trump.” One of my central points throughout that
week’s series was that every class I’ve taught over the last few semesters has
been influenced by all that’s taking place in 2017 (now 2018) American society
and culture: some more overtly (never more so than the Senior
Seminar on Analyzing 21st Century America I was in the midst of
teaching when the 2016
election took place), some more subtly (such as the different way I talk
about issues of American identity every time they come up in any class, which is
of course pretty often for this AmericanStudier), but all influenced in one way
or another (or, typically, many ways). If that means that I have become more
political in my teaching than I once professed
to be, then so be it; certainly I have had more moments
of overt classroom advocacy or activism over the last few years than I in did
my entire first decade of teaching. But I think it’s at least as accurate to say
that our society and world have become so infused by these issues and debates
that everything we do in class, including things that don’t seem overtly
political at all, has at least some significant connection to social and
political contexts.
On the first day
of the NeMLA convention I attended two pedagogically focused roundtables that thoughtfully
addressed the more overt and more subtle forms of classroom politics,
respectively. The more overt was “Teaching Early American Literature in a Time
of Political Upheaval,” featuring talks by Thomas Doran, Hugh Egan, Teresa Gilliams,
Sarah
Young, Lucas Hardy, Joshua Bartlett, Todd
Thompson, and Alex
Moskowitz. To be clear, when I say “more overt” I don’t in any way mean
that these wonderful and nuanced individual talks were advocating for any
particular form of classroom political engagement, or even for so engaging at
all; instead, the roundtable as a whole recognized and responded to many of the
same aspects of Teaching under Trump that I discussed above, highlighting various
ways in which materials, discussions, and other aspects of Early American
Literature classes necessarily connect to, are influenced by, and comment on
2018 social and political debates and issues. Moreover, each and every speaker
modeled an approach that welcomes every student perspective and voice, while
nonetheless working with the texts and contexts in ways that do not minimize
their ability to speak to some of the darkest and most challenging sides to our
contemporary moment. I came away from this great discussion even more motivated
to seek that elusive combination of textual and historical focus in the
classroom paired with collective recognition of the contemporary connections
for those topics.
Offering a more
subtle but just as significant set of models was the second roundtable, “Imagined
Connections: The Space of Empathy in the Undergraduate Classroom,” featuring
talks by Sarah
Foust Vinson and Susan
Larkin, Lisbeth
Fuisz, Martin
Gasper, Kathleen Hanggi,
Kerry
Hasler-Brooks, Melissa
Jenkins, and Matthew
Leporati. Questions of empathy in literature and writing classrooms—its possibilities
and limits, the role of texts and cultural works, whether and how it can cross
boundaries between identities and communities, and so on—are of course not at
all limited or specific to this contemporary moment, and these talks rightly
engaged with them in ways that would be just as relevant in other times. Yet at
the same time, I don’t think it’s just my own argument that empathy
is a form of resistance in Trump’s America that made this roundtable and
its thoughtful and inspiring talks so particularly salient in 2018. That is, if
empathy is both a complex potential goal for any specific class and one of the
things that educational spaces and communities can always encourage and
amplify, this is a moment when it becomes more important than ever to think
about whether, when, and how to work for it. These great talks and speakers
gave me plenty of ways to consider those questions as I move forward with my
Teaching under Trump.
Last recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. NeMLA
responses or thoughts? Other organizations or conferences you’d highlight?
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