Teaching Series: Structures

It strikes me as odd that I’ve not talked about teaching yet. I do not think of teaching as the thing that interrupts my writing. Instead, I understand it as a practical arm of the research, a way to bring my thoughts to a small audience. In the next few weeks, I’ll write about how I blend my teaching with my writing.

As many of you know, academic departments undergo review every so often. It is part of the accreditation process, usually requiring a self-study and external evaluation. Recently, Bates’s English department underwent this process. I was asked one question that I’d like to discuss here. How do I teach the whole of the African American tradition?

This question is about temporal coverage. Quite a few pioneers in African American literature were trained as medievalists including the late Sue E. Houchins, and Trudier Harris, both of whom I regard as mentors, colleagues, and friends. As a result of this intellectual genealogy, many of us understand the need for covering a large time period. My answer to the question was largely about structure.

I understand the structure of a classroom to include all the components that lead students to gather with me. First, my hire is a structure. The existence of my position forces everyone at the college, students included, to reckon with the space needed for the study of African American literature. Second, the course catalogue functions as a structure. In it, students and advisors can view how all of African American literature is covered with me at the helm: two introductory survey courses, five intermediate courses, and three upper division courses. All of them in consistent rotation do the work of coverage. Lastly, the syllabus provides a structure (more on that later). But, wait?! These structures don’t teach. Oh ho ho, grasshopper! They certainly do. The structure of the institution is a pedagogy. The course catalogue is a pedagogy. Both indicate an institutional commitment to studying Black literature and its vastness.

What does all this have to do with writing?

I’d encourage you to think about what structures surround the writing – the title, the press/journal, the cover, the subtitles in chapters, the back of the book marketing copy, the blurbs – as allies in teaching people how your work functions in the world. There are certainly limitations to what each of these structures can do. But, we can certainly put pressure on them to do useful instructive work.