Engage the Contradictions!: Contested American Studies Teaching and Pedagogy

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

This Roundtable builds off of the American Quarterly 2016 Forum on Teaching and Pedagogy in American Studies, which highlighted three key components in American Studies Teaching and Pedagogy: public humanities/ interdisciplinarity, transnationalism, and campus/ community collaboration. Panelists for this roundtable highlight key lessons from these pedagogical efforts by foregrounding how American Studies scholars "engage contradictions" within them, building off of Charles Hale’s collection on the theory, practice, and methods of activist scholarship and knowledge production (2008).

Among the central contradictions implicit in this discussion are the changing content and context of American Studies, the politics of knowledge production and reception, and reflection of the varied and scaffolded contexts of how materials are taught and received. Thus, the question of "what is taught" in American Studies is a central question, as is understanding who is being taught, where, and how. This roundtable addresses the traditional undergraduate classroom (even where there is no presumed "traditional" student in attendance), the public nature of our field in classrooms in and outside the US, and an innovative prison-teaching program that centralizes the question of knowledge and freedom in the context of incarceration.

This panel asks us to "engage the contradictions" of teaching and pedagogy in American Studies in our current political and institutional moment. It is aimed to spur an active and engaged conversation, to share stories, and to learn from others, as well as to reflect more deeply on the pedagogical role that shapes a large part of our professional lives, and oftentimes, our political commitments.

Our contributions highlight the material, ideological, and historical contexts for how teaching serves as a critical political project (i.e. teaching in the context of US foreign policy imperatives and militarization). Julie Sze and Megan Bayles focus on teaching the Introduction to American Studies course during the election season and just right after Trump's inauguration, attempting to make sense of how to teach a course rooted in the intellectual and political history of the field during and after a "post-truth" campaign that promises to "Make America Great Again." Tanya Erzen analyzes an innovative prison teaching and public memory course in order to discuss educational justice and the question of freedom in a carceral context. Sujani Reddy applies abolitionist perspectives to explore the constitutive limitations of our higher education classrooms for enacting and envisioning social justice and suggests a need for "deschooling" our ambitions. Christina Owens discusses the neoliberal context of teaching American Studies to international students in the US, asking how subversive pedagogy can simultaneously engage and critique the internationalization and marketization of US higher education. Together, the roundtable participants question the role of American Studies pedagogy within contested spaces and explore how these contexts — carceral, neoliberal, market-driven, "America first" and international — shape our work and teaching.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Julie Sze, University of California, Davis

Panelists

• Julie Sze, University of California, Davis

• Sujani K Reddy, Graduate Center of the City University of New York

• Megan Bayles, University of California, Davis

• Tanya Erzen, University of Puget Sound

• Christina Owens, Vassar College