This collaboratively written article explores the power of oral history for teaching about war, capitalism, and empire. Philip Napoli has interviewed for former students about their experiences conducting oral histories with US military personnel. The authors find that while oral history can produce outcomes for students that are associated with both the status quo and progressive thinking, in all

A review of Matthew E. Henry's Teaching While Black. Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2020. Matthew E. Henry's slim, searing first book of poems, Teaching While Black, is composed of situations or "teaching moments" that have occured throughout his life and particularly in his career as a Black teacher at mostly white and privileged schools. Particularly timely after the recent police killings of

The introduction for issue 117: Teaching About Capitalism, War, and Empire in a Time of Covid-19.

Educators in the United States have failed in teaching about war. Educators have failed to teach broadly enough, consistently enough, and with the sense of urgency demanded by the immense destruction of the United States’ Post-9/11 Wars. In the spirit of exchanging ideas, strategies, and inspiration, this article offers 56 suggestions for teaching about war. While the suggestions are focused on people

A review of Matt Brim's Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University. Duke University Press, 2020.

This article explores the pedagogical takeaways of a faculty led study-tour with U.S. university students in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It offers examples of how to teach students first-hand about settler colonialism, neoliberalism, securitization, and racialization. We examine how theories of co-implication and bearing witness can encourage students to take part in transnational solidarity

The United States today is marked by a culture that is both militarized and commoditized, in which education has become both an enabler to a state of permanent war and a facilitator of business and industry imperatives. The increasing militarism of America’s schools, colleges, and universities demands a response. Active and informed dissent is what’s required, for nothing is more truly American or

The State of our country has not changed significantly since the 1960's when I joined the peace movement. Change will come through the voting booth.

This article offers strategies for a peace pedagogy that is informed by combining techniques from feminist theory and peace studies with the digital humanities. Here we describe how the first-year Writing Seminar “Peace Testimonies in Literature & Art,” taught in Spring 2017 at Haverford College, collaborated with the activist organization the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to participate

This book review of Teaching When the World Is on Fire, a collection of essays edited by Lisa Delpit, discusses some of the strengths of the collection, highlights particularly useful chapters and reflects on ways the volume might have better achieved the explicit and implicit goals set forth by the editor.

On Thursday, April 18 my students and I coordinated an activity in which we celebrated the National Bilingual/Multilingual Learner Advocacy Month. In this activity, one of our adjuncts professors presented information about the struggle that a Puerto Rican woman, Evelina Lopez Antonetty had in providing access to bilingual education to a monolingual-Spanish community in the South Bronx . The South

The 'privilege walk' is a classroom activity at many colleges and universities deployed to create a visual, embodied, and concreterepresentation of students' earned and unearned social advantages. In this article, we engage in a systematic reflection to interpret the privilege walk through an intersectional lens, and we elaborate on our concerns around the use of the activity. We claim thatthe privilege

Conceptualized as writing for justice, I offer close-scrutiny and analyses of teaching artifacts that animate my course syllabi in order to understand how first-year composition (FYC) courses might function as a vehicle for advancing social justice. Specifically, this essay offers a framework for enabling students with the critical capacities to transfer social justice knowledge from the classroom

Corporatization of Higher Education has introduced new performance measurements as well as an acceleration of academic tasks creating working environments characterised by speed, pressure and stress. This paper discusses findings from a qualitative, feminist participatory action research (PAR) study undertaken by an interdisciplinary team of women academics at a modern, corporate university in England

A review of Eric Blanc's Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strikes and Working-Class Politics. NY: Verso, 2019.

Today on college campuses in the U.S., “social justice” is everywhere—a bright signal of some institutional wokeness in institutions that have not always been good or awake to the needs of many in their communities. In 2014, I joined the trend, as part of a small group of faculty and staff at Portland Community College, that created a concentration of courses called the Social Justice Focus Award and

This article explores complexities in teaching Black-authored material (especially Hip Hop lyricism) in premominantly non-Black college composition courses. It uses Barbara Smith's (1978) "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism" as a lens through which to define and examine those complexities. It offers antiracist pedogogal practices and posits withdrawal for reflection and self-care as a viable choice

In this essay combining first-person narrative and scholarly literature, a classroom teacher examines the ways in which, despite having a self-professed goal of teaching for social justice, her syllabus centers, upholds, and normalize default whiteness in her classoom. She interrogates her own teaching practice and invites other teachers to do so, as well.

Teacher and students discuss the use of art as a means of political discourse during the Trump Presidency.

In introductory classes on race and ethnicity, terms like wealth, economic inequality, and SES (socio-economic status) often take center stage during one chapter or another. There are numerous text books on this subject. But, I've had more success explaining these terms by using different media. To illustrate such important themes to non-economics majors, I often show and discuss The Queen of Versailles

Even more than the discipine that was so famously labelled the 'handmaiden of colonialism' (Asad, 1973), Development Studies has been associated in critique with the perpetuation of colonial and neocolonial thinking and practice. What would it take to decolonise the teaching of Development Studies? Is it even possible? This article takes an experiential look at an experimental interactive workshop-style

This is a reflection about teaching first year undergrads at an elite private institution in a predominantly white rural area about blackness and the prison industrial complex in a “writing intensive” course through the use of open letters and the politicization of vulnerability.

In this re-view of Mapping Queer Space(s) of Praxis and Pedagogy, I eschew standards of book reviewing and instead aim to provide a pedagogical model for reading the text in question. By writing in a "scattered" format inspired by one of the text's chapters, I both show and tell the reader the effect the text has had on me. Rather than focusing on summary and evaluation, then, I write primarily about

Book Review of Decolonizing Academia by Clelia O. Rodriguez. The author was invited to keynote a closed symposium on libraries and open pedagogies by the reviewer who was personally affected by the reading of the text.

This graphic essay focuses on the use of graphic composition strategies and includes work by contributing authors from my community college composition classroom. The main point of this piece is that *everyone deserves access to important ideas and information and that using comics to teach and to learn disciplines us to pare away the nonessential and prioritize foundational content. Pictures and emphatic

The subject of monuments and their historical value in the present, a topic of great debate both politically and culturally in recent years, has brought to the forefront how prevalent white supremacy is in contemporary society. This subject hit close to home for me and my students as the toppling of confederate statues in downtown Durham and Silent Sam on the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's

In the digital age, scholars are increasingly arguing that one of the best ways to teach writing is by assigning students to write for audiences beyond the classroom. In this article, I argue that this praxis of publishing student writing is not merely a response to the internet, but has also been crucial to genealogies of feminist pedagogy, and that attending to this genealogy can help us think in

Dreyer's English, by Benjamin Dreyer, the Senior Copy Editor for Random House, and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style are two extraordinarily popular and commercially successful guides to English language usage that belong to a genre best described as discursive maps for language as racialized, classed and gendered territory. This review traces the history of these books to the nineteenth century

The practice of multicultural scaffolding, offering more information about an author’s marginalized identity, is frequently offered as the solution to challenging social justice discussions in the classroom. However, this type of scaffolding presupposes that intricate knowledge of another person's subjectivity is required for ethical classroom behavior. I argue, instead, that students are able to handle

Given that manifestos are an understudied genre of writing, few undergraduate students learn about their history, style, and potential political impact. This essay reviews the history of manifestos, followed by descriptions of teaching students to write their own manifesto in an upper-division women and gender studies course I teach on radical writings. The rewards and possibilities of manifesto writing

When using critical pedagogy in college classrooms, college students can sometimes experience critique fatigue -- a despondency that results from a saturation of analysis about experiences of oppression that they experience directly. This is especially the case when there is no creative outlet for political, emotional, or practical response to the critical course material built into the classroom activities

Drawing on queer and feminist Digital Humanities (DH) and Indigenous, antiracist, and intersectional approaches to publishing, this pedagogy piece reflects on a course designed and taught in Fall 2018 titled “Intersectional Feminist Journal Praxis.” Students read intersectional readings on publishing while creating their own journal through Open Journal Systems Software (OJS). Employing principles

The project of creating an anti-oppressive composition issue began with multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration between Julia Havard, Erica Cardwell, Anandi Rao, Juliet Kunkle and Rosalind Diaz, who crafted a call for community-building and community-transformation: to build tools, resources, and spaces for transforming our classrooms, specifically our writing classrooms; and to approach

This analysis addresses the need to develop an ethos of decolonial refusal in Composition Studies and the academy in general, arguing that refusal is a livening rhetorical strategy of survival that challenges colonial futurity (Tuck and Yang), is generative and generous (McGranahan), and opens liminal space (Anzaldua, Garcia-Pena, Lugones) for existing in predominantly white institutions — not at the

In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Hero, one of the central female characters, functions as the dramatic means of defining and performing masculinity for the male characters around her, and her palpable silence in the unfolding of her own “romantic” plot can point to the similarity of the gender politics of romance and marriage between Elizabethan England and 21st century India. The comedic "resolution"

In a unit on social movements for freedom, urban fourth grade students examined the activities and lives of activists who worked for social change. Using an integrative and strategic approach to literacy, children researched, wrote, and presented their ideas to family and community members through visual, textual, digital and artistic expressions. In this autoethnography, I present several stories

This is a teaching note. Therefore, I did not include an abstract. However, if there were one, it would be this:Lester and Tina Pine’s 1974 film, Claudine, is a fictitious story depicting the dating life of Claudine, a 36-year old African American mother of six who had been married twice (and “almost twice”). This film can be used to explain internalized oppression and how it might manifest itself

Critical courage and love require that we consider our own humanity's need for not only justice but also healing. Often, radical educators relentlessly focus on working towards social justice to the point where they neglect their own self-preservation, which includes processes and practices of healing. This article discusses how a pedagogy of disruption and healing were applied towards confronting

The extensive amount of academic labor of minoritized faculty, especially at research institutions, has been well documented in the academic literature. Three tenured associate professors at The University of Texas present the genesis, evolution, and postscript of leading and serving in an initiative to de-silo and encourage collaboration across the university, culminating in a collaboratively taught

In response to recent ant-LGBTQ initiatives, this short essay highlights six strategies teachers and librarians can use to address LGBTQ visibility in classes and libraries to be more inclusive.

In four undergraduate arts-related courses taught by three faculty, undergraduate students learned how to edit Wikipedia to present authentic research to a public audience. The goal was to increase free and open access to information about women and minoritized individuals in the arts, while simultaneously facilitating the acquisition and practice of student information literacy, research, and writing

In a film class focused on “white redemption” narratives, students discuss what gets left out of the story told in Boys Don’t Cry .

A high school English teacher tries to steer a student writing a research paper in a more politically relevant direction and learns something important when her efforts backfire.

In a course on Art, Politics and Protest, ”the novel and film provide students with an intense introduction to imperialism."

Alexie’s short story collection proves to be “a great tool for complicating the issue of identity” in an introductory literature class.

This Note describes several strategies used in a seminar course on chick lit to defamiliarize for students the romantic tropes of the genre.

In literature and in composition classes, this film, based on the true story of the murder of transgender young man, initiates important discussions of the construction of gender.

In a senior seminar on Globalization, Human Rights, and Citizenship, this 1948 document surprises and attracts students with its broad, progressive vision

These are two poems written from combining students' answers to specific questions about birth and fear. They are choral pieces, and address the way that sexism shapes decisiosn made about women's bodies in regard to birth, travel, public spaces, relationships and more.

Gilb’s short story collection encourages students in a Chicano Literature course to analyze “class, gender, and ethnicity together.”

High school students shown photographs used by Frederick Douglass in anti-racism campaigns work their way towards a more historical understanding of the definition of “race.”

This collection of stories works well to introduce literature students to issues of race, gender, and class.

Pairs of students research, develop, and present short lessons on key grammar issues to their classmates, making a frequently tedious topic more than bearable.

Playing a recording of “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby and then another, by Otis Redding, leads to a thoughtful discussion of racism in a composition class.

A short piece, originally published in Radical Teacher , leads to thoughtful papers on homophobia and heterosexism in a college composition class.

An assignment in a composition class to compare two responses to racism by professional athletes works very differently a second time, when there are African American students in the class.

Richard Wright’s novel meets serious resistance from students but sudden and intense media attention on a police manhunt for a young black man brings them a new perspective on the book.

This essay offers readers a model for self-grading as a mechanism to catalyze liberatory learning. Drawing inspiration from the feminist and participatory pedagogical approaches of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Adrienne Rich, the author grounds this discussion within her disciplinary field and professional role, identifies key elements of the model and the teaching practice that surrounds it, and addresses

Fausto-Sterling’s engaging book helps students in a course on Contemporary Biosocial Problems better understand the impact of ideology on science.

This book, and the related documentary film, use oral histories to present students with a varied view of lesbian and gay experience.