We are continuing in this issue of the Newsletter our series on teaching
the new American literatures. Raymund Paredes writes here about approaching
Chicano literature and David Bergman about gay and lesbian texts. Randall Bass
talks about something more purely pedagogical using the computer in the
classroom.
These essays in themselves illustrate the wide variety of strategies available
for teaching a reconstructed American literature and for teaching in general.
Paredes’ approach is largely historical, emphasizing key moments like the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which have led to the flourishing of Chicano
writing today. He also underlines some of the recent developments in Chicano
literature, like the concern for borders and liminality. As readers will
see, these are also themes emphasized in the Contemporary section of the
Anthology’s Second Edition.
In his essay, Bass discusses the pedagogic imaginary and how canon and
syllabus are beginning to merge in this information age. He specifically
discusses the electronic resources developed to supplement The Heath
Anthology, new technologies for new courses. Bergman focuses more on
problems of classroom dynamics, of particular consequence in working with such
a conflicted area as lesbian and gay literature. I think readers will find his
concrete pedagogical strategies not only helpful in that domain but more widely
suggestive of strategies for coping with reluctant and even angry students.
Whatever else The Heath Anthology has become a symbol, a challenge, a
success story, an expression of change it is, first and last, a teaching text.
Therefore, I particularly want to call your attention to two major tools
directed at the needs of teachers. The computerized Syllabus Builder
has been expanded and redesigned and is now available in both Macintosh
and IBM-PC compatible formats. I can say on the basis of my own experience as
an until recently computer-illiterate teacher that these disks are not only
friendly but wonderfully informative. The material has been drawn by Randy
Bass from over thirty real syllabi of courses people have actually taught. So
the material has the authenticity and concreteness we find so helpful.
We are also completing a new edition of the Instructor’s Guide,
edited by John Alberti of Northern Kentucky University. The new edition will
not only be significantly revised and updated, but it will include essays akin
to those we have run in the Newsletter designed to provide contexts for
and ideas about teaching a reconstructed American literature.
I want to conclude, on the occasion of the publication of a Second Edition of
the anthology, with a personal note. When some of us began to talk twenty-five
years ago about reconstructing American literature, and even when we
implemented a project at The Feminist Press to take steps toward that goal
about fifteen years ago, it all seemed quite visionary, chillingly optimistic.
Now I perceive that real change has taken place not that the process is
completed far from it. But I do remember what students were expected to study
in 1968, and I see where many of us are now. So my optimism and energy get
renewed. Primarily because I meet so many of you trying this, risking that
(often a great deal, in fact), working very hard to make education valuable to
our students. That is no easy task right now, when colleges and universities
are under unprecedented ideological and economic attack, when the very value of
education seems to be questioned.
These Newsletters, the interactions we have at meetings, the seminars in
which we participate (like the wonderful institute on multicultural literature
Carla Mulford organized this past June at Penn State) serve practical goals
like expanding our teaching repertoires. But for me, at least, they have a
much more fundamental purpose: overcoming the isolation of the separate campus
and the individual classroom, building as we used to call it a sense of
solidarity. I still find that a good term; it means that we’re part of a
cultural and social movement for meaningful, valid change that we help build
and that supports us in our work. So I want to say a word of personal thanks
for the sustenance I’ve received from so many of you, for the opening of
new opportunities, and the renewal of that optimism which was not, I think, at
all misplaced.
