For more than thirty years I have taught high school English and history, and every day of the thousands I have spent in the classroom my students have taught me in return. Talk about life-long learning! Here’s my latest challenge, one which I hope you—whoever you are; wherever you teach, study, and learn; whenever you have a moment—can help me meet.
I’m currently directing an international studies program and, within it, teaching the junior English component of its curriculum. After two years of world literature and history in our program, juniors focus on American Studies before again returning to the world during their senior year. Seeking to build on what our students have learned during their freshman and sophomore years, my teaching colleagues and I endeavor to make American Studies more “worldly.” The challenge we face at nearly every curricular turn, however, is how to make not just connections between American Studies and the world, but connections that truly matter. In other words, how do we create and then employ a vibrant, global context for our instruction in American literature and history?
So that you know more about what I have done and am doing, I have linked to the syllabus of texts for my course, essential questions, and a multi-faceted research project that I recently created and which my students have gamely undertaken. I have also linked to the program I direct, The Glenbrook Academy, as well as two organizations that support my daily work in and out of the classroom—the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the International Studies Schools Association (ISSA).
As teacher, as student, as learner, what do you think? And what do you do that will lend a more worldly context to my students’ and my daily skirmishes with American texts?
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Well in my opinion the best way to contextualize American literature(moreover: culture) into a global, multicultural setting is not through seeking the secular elements of American literature, but through an attempt to rationalize the idiosyncrasies that American texts hold as compared to their global counterparts. That taken into consideration, I would incorporate Faulkner, the great experimental southern tragi-comedian; O'Connor, the master of shocking revelation (whose precedent has no doubt transgressed into modern hollywood-shock-factor cinema); fitzgerald and miller, who embodied the live-now-live-fast mentality in his works (though often from a detached perspective)that is relevant and so archetypal of modern america; civil war literature, as there has never been a more dire and divisive conflict forced upon the collective American psyche, and finally the stories of the native americans,whose tragic demise has crafted a real mythology for antecedent generations. Through portraying the uniqueness of the American mind, you can highlight the presence of a collective American spirit, which is otherwise irresolutely difficult to characterize in light of the melanges that are so important in America's cultural development. This literature certainly is an accumulationand assimilation of the intricately-woven histories/backgrounds that comprise the fabric of america's cultural identity.
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