Teaching American Studies - by Elizabeth A Duclos-Orsello & Joseph B Entin & Rebecca Hill (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

"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.

Review Quotes

"This book offers wonderful resources for teaching American Studies, especially with a focus on race, gender, sexuality, and power in a moment of danger in which such resources are badly needed. Focusing on teachers and students in classrooms, this book powerfully intervenes in current debates about the significance of the university today. With thoughtful contributions from many of the top scholars currently working in the field, this book will be invaluable for teachers, students, and other scholars and readers."--Shelley Streeby, professor of literature and ethnic studies, University of California, San Diego

"This innovative collection invites us to recognize that American Studies 'scholarship' happens as much in what and how we teach as in the research we publish. The editors have brought together an exciting array of essays by scholar-teachers working in different educational contexts, from public universities to liberal arts colleges, high schools to adult education classes. These essays offer practical ideas for those who teach American Studies in all its various incarnations. But they offer much more than that, including reflections on teaching and learning as embodied experiences, and, perhaps most strikingly, a fascinating portrait of the field today as a site of interdisciplinary inquiry, critique, and discovery on the part of students as well as teachers and scholars."--Julia L. Mickenberg, professor of American Studies, University of Texas at Austin

"This is an expansive and much-needed volume that is both timely and imperative. Particularly impressive is the interdisciplinary range of critical race and American Studies scholarship that enlivens the various pedagogical interventions while simultaneously attending to new key terms, essential topics in twenty-first-century politics, and the ever-shifting dynamics of American identity. Truly, Teaching American Studies: State of the Classroom as State of the Field is indispensable for our contemporary academic and applied considerations of American Studies."--Kim D. Hester Williams, coeditor, Racial Ecologies, and chair, American Multicultural Studies, Sonoma State University

"As rancorous debates over the perceived ills of critical race theory and public history interventions such as the 1619 Project continue to place American studies and its teachers and students in the cross hairs of a reactionary media, this collection will be of great use to instructors interested in pedagogical approaches to the most controversial issues of the day. Highly recommended."--Choice