In a moment when many who work in the humanities are asking or are made to answer self-justifying questions, I have seen first-hand how literature and theory help students, particularly from underrepresented backgrounds, to name their experiences and relationships with power. I ask all my students to take responsibility for their ideas and their relationship to other people as they write, read, and imagine possible futures, but my students at the Danville Correctional Center have shown me how education can change reality on the ground for underserved communities. My experiences at the prison, responding to the urgencies of a complex learning environment, provide a foundation for a pedagogy that approaches all student learning with an emphasis on adaptability and dialogue.
Because DCC is a state prison, all materials must be approved before they can enter the classroom. In Spring 2023, students did not have access to some of their books until halfway through the semester, so my students and I treated each week as an opportunity to develop the course collaboratively. We would choose texts that had already been approved and might pair well to discuss one week in advance, with students often working within the system to distribute materials between classes. Each class became an exercise in adaptability, not only changing reading materials and writing assignments but also bringing in additional materials that might help students to name the power struggles they faced daily. One student’s questions about an encounter with a guard before class resulted in an engaged discussion about Agamben and the relationship between the state and abjection. When I briefly referenced Gramsci in our discussions of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), two students brought a library copy of The Prison Notebooks to class so we could further discuss hegemony in both literature and life. I bring this same adaptability to all my classes, using planned content as a jumping off point to respond to student questions and incorporate student knowledge and ideas.
In my five years of teaching interdisciplinary courses in composition, business writing, and literature, I have asked students to treat both reading and writing as conversation, as a way of thinking about the world through engagement with difference and discomfort—or what Julietta Singh calls “undoing mastery.” Reflecting my research on oral storytelling as a transnational aesthetic that is commensurable with written traditions, I center Indigenous theories of orality and sound that ask us to listen and read with an awareness of our own biases and imagine alternative ways of living and thinking in the world. I feel it is important for students to understand how they rely on genealogies of thought in their own work and how those genealogies can be revised and challenged to disrupt hegemonic discourses. This approach has led to a forthcoming article in Double Helix on what I call collaborative self-efficacy and an award for demonstrated excellence in teaching.
Each of the tools I have developed encourages collaborative reflection and invites students to take responsibility for their learning. Annotation notebooks are at the center of my approach, asking students to combine synthesis and analysis in low-stakes, short-form writing in collaboration with what they are reading. These annotations are not about “getting it right” but about working through ideas together. Rather than absorb facts and arguments as they are found in the text, students can use their notebooks and time in class to develop ideas in conversation with what they have read and to think through their relationship with themselves and the world.
I begin each literature class with a student presentation on a piece of art from the period and part of the world we are studying. The student speaks for only a few minutes, presenting biographical data about the artist(s) and some context for the artwork itself, as well as their interpretation of the relationship between the art and the text. For instance, when I taught Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879) in a literature survey, a student presented on Jim Denomie’s (Ojibwe) Eminent Domain, a painting of a historical map of the United States that depicts ceremony and colonial violence over scenes of Manifest Destiny, and we built our class discussion from her reflections on the relationship between a physical home and an imagined home in the face of colonial expansion. In this class, I also took a digital humanities approach and had students work in ArcGIS, a mapping software, to represent the spaces depicted in our texts as they see them. One group carefully followed R. Rider Haggard’s fictional map of Africa in She (1886), while another located Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s (Marshallese) poetry in relation to the approximate locations of the islands in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Rather than relying on a colonial perspective, they brought their own perspectives, and those of Indigenous artists and scholars, to the maps to critique the colonial projects in which we are all implicated.
Each of these projects, as well as more traditional writing assignments, asks students to collaborate with texts and each other to question enduring ideas, as well as their own assumptions. I make this process explicit by focusing on habitual revision in the writing process. Students are asked to develop self-reflective habits through practice in order to better understand their own relationship to a community or communities. I employ what Joseph Harris calls “a dialogic sense of revision” to establish a relationship between students’ self-reflection and conversation or collaboration. All of my students struggle to revise, or even recognize where revision is needed. So, in conversation with Marilyn Cooper’s formulation of habit as “active comportment toward the world,” I developed a dialogic revision process in which students use other people’s writing and feedback to ask questions about their own writing. Before submitting a draft, students must annotate it with questions and reflections on their own writing based on criteria they have gleaned from their favorite writers. Their fellow students and I then respond to each and every annotation. Finally, they must respond to our responses, reflecting on their choices. Students have told me that this approach really helps them see themselves as writers and gain confidence in collaborating with others.
Attending to students’ many cultural and educational backgrounds and academic specializations, I aim to create an environment where students can bring their own goals and interests into their writing and research while becoming more confident learners. Students must confront ideas that make them uncomfortable in my class, but they are able to do so in a space where even their mistakes are respected as learning opportunities. My students often bring in prior knowledge to interrogate their own assumptions, as when one student in a business writing course introduced a Donna Haraway reading from another class to think about how even sentence structure might contribute to feminist practice. A student at the prison, uncomfortable with his lack of access to the Spanish language sections of Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), referenced Paulo Freire to explore and better understand his frustration. As a class, we built on that reference to question what it means for monolingual English speakers to learn from multilingual texts. In all my classes, I expect students to enter into conversation with difficult texts and respond in nuanced ways. Together, we come to look at texts as collections of possibilities that produce our ways of thinking and to question them with an understanding that all ideas are relational.
Erin Cheslow 