Sarah Robbins
Professor, Kennesaw State University
A Verbal Map of my Teaching: Multiple American Literatures in Various Locales
My own career as a teacher of American Literature might be best conveyed by way of a map representing connections between the particular place where I was studying and/or teaching and my shifting conception of the field. When I first did graduate work at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, for example, "American Literature" was primarily my Eight American Authors text in Dr. Richard Fogle's class. Because he was such an imposing figure individually, and because UNC at that point in the late 1970's was such an authoritative-seeming place, it never occurred to me to ask why only one woman (Emily Dickinson) was included in the text or in the course (and new England males (Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and James). Poe was there too, but he was in the pantheon as a theorist of aesthetics and a producer of unique short stories, certainly not as a southern writer.
When I began teaching high school, I worked first at an all-boys school run by Benedictine monks in Savannah, Georgia. There the conception of American literature I had received at UNC was reinforced in many ways. For one thing, the series of paperback anthologies I was given to use (with titles like The Beginnings of American Literature) echoed the New England emphasis of my study at UNC, and the questions after each selection in the readers focused on formalist analysis of sort texts (poems, short stories, a few Revolutionary-era speeches, for example) like those I had studied in my own college classes. I remember being relieved at finding so many familiar selections: These were texts I "knew," so I felt prepared to teach them.
Living in a city as rich in local history as Savannah is, however, I did begin to wonder how I could link a sense of that place to my students' learning of American literature. For the first time, I noticed that the anthologies I was using included no diaries of southern settlers, so I went to the community historical society to see if I could find some "local" texts to pair with Bradford and Sewell. (This excursion is worth a story in itself: if you've ever tried to "intrude" on an institution in an old southern town very conscious of its own identity, you may never have really felt what it means to be a social outsider in a "very proper" southern place!) And for the first time, I began to see disjunctions between what I had studied enthusiastically and what my students would eagerly learn: they just weren't as excited about Whitman and Emerson as I had been. I began to select particular texts with them in mind, although my first adjustments were tentative moves like substituting Benito Cereno or Billy Budd for Moby Dick, The Turn of the Screw or Daisy Miller for the The Ambassadors.
When I moved to Michigan several years later, I was in for yet another disquieting but healthy wake-up call. Living in Flint, where the auto industry's history dominated daily life, I found myself even more intrigues y the idea that literature was composed and read in varying cultural contexts for varying purposes. Moving from a junior high to a K-8 school, then to a community college and finally to a K-12 school, I was also more and more concerned about my students as readers and writers, and about their varying needs, abilities, and goals. "American Literature" took on a very different form every time I changed settings. The assigned curricular materials for my seventh grade remedial students, for instance, were "weekly reader"-type publications of "high interest" stories that I felt underestimated their talents and long-term goals. The simple idea that they might do some writing of their own to produce some "literary" texts to read seemed revolutionary to my colleagues that year. And anyway, why would I want to have to "grade papers" for a "remedial reading class"? Later, having moved on to the community college, I had similar reaction when I asked if I could use some contemporary literature in my freshman composition course: I was "supposed" to be teaching " modes" like comparison and contrast, definition, persuasion--not a literature course. But I had read my students' personal narratives--stories of displaced autoworkers with no job skills searching for a way to reclaim a place in a changing America, stories of welfare mothers trying to get any kind of job, stories by kids from families where no one had ever though about needing anything beyond a high school diploma--and I thought they needed to READ to become better writers, and to read texts that mattered to them, not just structural examples of different "techniques" for organizing and argument. So I turned to the language of advertising and popular music, since this avenue seemed to make my new colleagues less uncomfortable than printed "literature: texts, and we analyzed the rhetoric of popular culture. In my own mind, I was still teaching American literature, and I was using some of the same approaches to interpretation I had used in the past, but I was connecting reading more explicitly to the writing of my students, and I was focusing on non-print texts.
What a change when I went back to K-12 at an alternative school with a curriculum grounded in the premise that all children could/would go to college, and that all would go with a foundation in the arts and humanities. Suddenly able to create my own curriculum, I was amazed to see the syllabus of my predecessor, who had moved out of state. The American literature course for juniors was one semester of twentieth-century novels and another of drama and poetry. The novels ranged from A Farewell to Arms to The Grapes of Wrath and One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest -- all great books, certainly, but a rather limited list in terms of gender and ethnicity. I added texts like The Color Purple and held my breath, but no one complained. For the freshmen, the school had "always" used the McDougal, Littell anthology, and I kept on with that same text the first year, but the new history teacher and I merged our class syllabi and tried to create a kind of American Studies experience for our students. It was a struggle, because we were both still driven by the long-standing power of the "coverage" mandate imbedded in our own preparation and past teaching, so we may have overwhelmed our students rather than informing and exciting them. I did become more and more aware, though, of how little I understood about "my" field, and more determined to revive my own scholarship, which had been shoved aside too long because of the daily demands of teaching.
My return to graduate school at the University of Michigan didn't answer my questions about what to teach and how. Instead, I found more complex questions. Those questions drove my own course selection and my continued teaching (back in Flint at the K-12 and in classrooms at U-M) during my degree work. I taught a freshman composition course organized around the theme of "The American Identity," and a 200-level class on short stories and novels organized around "American Placea, American Themes." I had my high school students back in Flint read the same materials at the same time, carrying on email conversations with their counterparts at U-M. The disagreements and the similar responses to individual texts were equally stimulating for me, prodding me to think about new says of grouping texts, new ways of integrating student writing with their reading of American literature, and new ways of considering the purposes for literary study in my students' complicated lives.
By the time I finished my doctoral program and returned to Georgia, I had acquired a "specialty" in nineteenth-century women's literature and the beginnings of a publication list. I had begun to study "Ethnic Literatures" and "Post-Colonial Literature of the Americas" and to create syllabi for courses that didn't exist yet where I was about to teach, and I had learned how to argue both for the need to include such courses in the offerings of my new department and the need to integrate such "new" texts and "new" approaches to teaching them into already-existing surveys and period courses. But my current work in trying to help "re-make" American literature began when I started visiting area schools and found so many potential colleagues struggling with the same questions that had troubled me for so long. The secondary teachers in Kennesaw's service area in northwest Georgia face so many special challenges these days--an ever-increasing immigrant population, for example, set alongside students from very conservative households with parents active in the Christian Right. Collaborating with teachers who want to expand both the content of the classroom canon had to use a wide variety of approaches for teaching American literature has been an exciting challenge. I'm especially grateful that funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Georgia Council of Humanities, and the Regents of the University System for a number of projects through our National Writing Project site has supported this kind of work in a range of ways (e.g., our 1995 institute for history and English teachers to study American women's writing, our 1996-97 project of study and "lab school" teaching of American texts on the Journey from Childhood to Adulthood, and the new Making American Literatures Project). I look forward very much to meeting the teams from California and Michigan in July and to our sustained collaboration through this exciting new program.
Email: srobbins@ksumail.kennesaw.edu
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