"This collection of twenty essays by new and established American studies scholars presents a wide array of actual classroom experiences and teaching methods, as well as the solutions that they and other American studies teachers have devised to meet themyriad challenges facing the field. Teaching American Studies will act as a resource for faculty new to teaching American studies, a springboard for those seeking to renew or transform their current courses, and a touchstone for academics in other disciplines who wish to include elements of American studies theories, practices, or scholarship into their pedagogy. Where other volumes on American studies pedagogy have largely focused on providing course content, though, this volume's contributors demonstrate and contend that the classroom is the public face of American studies, the place where theory and practice converge, and ultimately where the field takes shape. In doing so, the book also joins public conversations about higher education, the politics of academic speech, reflecting present-day social and political concerns in the classroom, and student outreach"--
“What if American Studies is defined not so much in the pages of the most cutting-edge publications, but through what happens in our classrooms and other learning spaces ” In Teaching American Studies Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello, Joseph Entin, and Rebecca Hill ask a diverse group of American Studies educators to respond to that question by writing chapters about teaching that use a classroom activity or a particular course to reflect on the state of the field of American Studies.
Teaching American Studies speaks to teachers with a wide range of relationships to the field. To start, it is a useful how-to guide for faculty who might be new to, or unfamiliar with, American Studies. Each author brings the reader into their classes to offer specific, concrete details about their pedagogical practice and their students’ learning. The resulting chapters connect theory and educational action as well as share challenges, difficulties, and lessons learned. The volume also provides a collective impression of American Studies from the point of view of students and teachers. What primary and secondary texts and what theoretical challenges and issues do faculty use to organize their teaching? How does the teaching we do respond to our institutional and educational contexts? How do our experiences and those of our students challenge or change our understanding of American Studies? Chapters in this collection discuss teaching a broad range of materials, from memoirs and novels by Anne Moody and Octavia Butler, to cutting-edge cultural theory, to the widely used collection Keywords for American Cultural Studies. But the chapters in this collection are also about dancing, eating, and walking around a campus to view statues and gravestones. They are about teaching during the era of Donald Trump, of Black Lives Matter, about giving up authority in the classroom, about teaching in the South, in New England, in the Midwest, and for ten-minute intervals at a cooking school in New Jersey.
Teaching American Studies is both a new way to think about American Studies and a timely collection of effective ways to teach about race, gender, sexuality, and power in a moment of political polarization and intense public scrutiny of universities.
In Teaching American Studies the editors invite a diverse group of educators to provide chapters about teaching that use a classroom activity or a particular course to reflect on the state of the field of American Studies.
“What if American Studies is defined not so much in the pages of the most cutting-edge publications, but through what happens in our classrooms and other learning spaces?” In Teaching American Studies Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello, Joseph Entin, and Rebecca Hill ask a diverse group of American Studies educators to respond to that question by writing chapters about teaching that use a classroom activity or a particular course to reflect on the state of the field of American Studies.
Teaching American Studies speaks to teachers with a wide range of relationships to the field. To start, it is a useful how-to guide for faculty who might be new to, or unfamiliar with, American Studies. Each author brings the reader into their classes to offer specific, concrete details about their pedagogical practice and their students’ learning. The resulting chapters connect theory and educational action as well as share challenges, difficulties, and lessons learned. The volume also provides a collective impression of American Studies from the point of view of students and teachers. What primary and secondary texts and what theoretical challenges and issues do faculty use to organize their teaching? How does the teaching we do respond to our institutional and educational contexts? How do our experiences and those of our students challenge or change our understanding of American Studies? Chapters in this collection discuss teaching a broad range of materials, from memoirs and novels by Anne Moody and Octavia Butler, to cutting-edge cultural theory, to the widely used collection Keywords for American Cultural Studies. But the chapters in this collection are also about dancing, eating, and walking around a campus to view statues and gravestones. They are about teaching during the era of Donald Trump, of Black Lives Matter, about giving up authority in the classroom, about teaching in the South, in New England, in the Midwest, and for ten-minute intervals at a cooking school in New Jersey.
Teaching American Studies is both a new way to think about American Studies and a timely collection of effective ways to teach about race, gender, sexuality, and power in a moment of political polarization and intense public scrutiny of universities.
