Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 120

December 20, 2021: Wishes for the AMST Elves: Higher Ed Funding

[As ever, a holiday week series of wishes for the AmericanStudies Elves—this time focused on some of the communities and folks I love most. Leading up to a special post on a holiday wish for us all!]

One of the big stories of the last month (at least in the worlds of higher ed and scholarly Twitter) was the creation of a new “university” (scare quotes very, very intended), The University of Austin. In her Tweet announcing and describing this alternative “educational” institution, journalist Bari Weiss argued that “higher ed is broken.” [NOTE: I’m not hyperlinking to any of the promotional materials; you can find ‘em out there if you’d like!] I couldn’t disagree more, but one thing higher ed—and especially public higher ed—definitely is is broke. So before I turn for the rest of the week’s wishes to folks who are literally part of my family, I wanted to make a wish for a community that has over my 17 years here become home and family to be sure: my public university, Fitchburg State. AmericanStudies Elves, may a new year bring the funding and support that public higher education, and public education overall, so desperately needs and so powerfully deserves.

Next wish tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What wishes would you beam out to the Elves?

December 18-19, 2021: Spring Semester Previews

[This Fall was another extremely exhausting semester, and first and foremost I’m proud of all of us for making it through. But it also featured moments that reminded me of why we do what we do, and in this recap series I wanted to highlight one such moment from each of my Fall classes. Leading up to this weekend post on a few of the things I’m looking forward to in Spring 2022!]

On three of the many things I’m looking forward to in Spring 2022 (!):

1)      Du Bois Redux: As that hyperlinked post illustrates, my Major Author course on W.E.B. Du Bois, which concluded eight years ago this week, was and remains one of my favorites across my 17 years at FSU. I’ve since taught an excellent Major Author section focused on Mark Twain, but when the course came back around to me for Spring 2022, I knew that it was time to revisit Du Bois. I can’t wait to share the many, many sides, genres, layers, and legacies of my favorite American with a new group of students!

2)      19C Women Writers: A couple months back I blogged about my new role as our English Studies Graduate Program director, and my hope to draw more students from near and far (with your ideas, which I’d still love to hear!) to help keep that wonderful program going. Every chance I get to teach in that program reinforces its awesomeness, and I’m excited to teach this Spring, for a second time, my grad seminar on 19thcentury American Women Writers. From Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Fanny Fern to Frances Harper and Ida B. Wells, and with so so so many in between, this class features many of my favorite American writers and texts, and it’ll be great to share them with a group of fellow educators!

3)      Adult Learning and My Next Book: Work on my next book, Two Sandlots: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America, has been stop-and-start at best in this challenging Fall semester. To help that work along, and to share these histories and stories with some of my favorite communities in the process, I decided to focus my Spring adult ed courses for both the ALFA and WISE programs on the book. Excited to see what it helps me to emphasize, and especially to see how these awesome classes and communities respond!

Holiday series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Other Fall reflections or Spring previews you’d share?

December 17, 2021: Fall Semester Recaps: Adult Learning Class on the 1920s

[This Fall was another extremely exhausting semester, and first and foremost I’m proud of all of us for making it through. But it also featured moments that reminded me of why we do what we do, and in this recap series I wanted to highlight one such moment from each of my Fall classes. I’d love to hear your best and your hardest moments, and everything in between, from Fall 2021!]

On a particularly eye-opening and important conversation in one of my latest adult ed classes.

All five conversations in my WISE class on the America in the 1920s (and connections to the 2020s, natch) were as multi-vocal, engaging, and impressive as they’ve been in every adult learning course I’ve ever taught (these students haven’t missed a beat with the transition to remote learning, that’s for sure). But the most eye-opening for me was the conversation in the first class, which focused on the 1918-20 Influenza Pandemic. At least three students (and possibly more—this was three months ago, and they were three long months!) shared stories about how their own families and communities had been affected by the pandemic, paralleling and extending (and making far more personal of course) our conversations about historical, cultural, and literary texts. We talked a lot that day about how and why the pandemic was forgotten for so long (at least in such collective conversations), but by far my most important takeaway from the discussion, and especially from these voices and stories, was how much we can and should remember.

Special post this weekend on what’s next,

Ben

PS. Responses to this moment or other Fall 2021 reflections you’d share?

December 16, 2021: Fall Semester Recaps: Online American Lit Survey

[This Fall was another extremely exhausting semester, and first and foremost I’m proud of all of us for making it through. But it also featured moments that reminded me of why we do what we do, and in this recap series I wanted to highlight one such moment from each of my Fall classes. I’d love to hear your best and your hardest moments, and everything in between, from Fall 2021!]

On how small follow-ups can make a big difference, especially in online classes.

I’ve been teaching at least one online class a semester for more than seven years now, and over that time I’ve certainly gotten better at this new (to me) form of pedagogy in a variety of ways. For this semester’s online American Literature II course, as I indicated back in the Semester Previews series, I added a new component, short videos (of me talking—not high-tech enough for much else!) that introduced our different time periods/Units. I wasn’t a huge fan of what I was able to do with those videos—they felt largely redundant to the Word documents featuring Unit/time period contexts I was already providing students; if I’m to keep using them I’ll have to find a way to make them stand out more, I’d say—but I hope at least that they gave the students a little better sense of me, my voice and perspective, my ideas, the kinds of things I’d of course share as part of (or at least frames for) our discussions in in-person classes.

I’ve also recently found another way to add myself into these online classes a bit more, and this semester it yielded some unexpected and really compelling moments. I’ve written at length about my gradual shifts in grading processes and emphases, and as part of that I’ve started to give both Paper Feedback (focused more on writing and analytical skills) and Idea Feedback (focused more on, well, y’know). While I would never want to insert my own takes on readings and related topics into the Paper Feedback (that’s about my response to their skills and work), I’ve felt more comfortable doing that in the Idea Feedback if and when it’s felt relevant: if, for example, a student is analyzing Sui Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free,” as a few did in my online American Lit course this past semester, I’ll pass along my first ever Saturday Evening Post column from back in January 2018, a piece which I began with a bit of my own analysis of that story in historical and cultural contexts.

I can’t say that I really expect students to read such pieces when I share them—they’re not required (or even optional) readings for the course, after all, and there are more than enough of those that I’m already asking my students to look at. But when they not only do take a look, but also share some continued thoughts in response, each and every one of those moments immediately becomes a favorite for me, with different sides of my work and career, different conversations I’m part of, coming together in such inspiring ways. Those quick email follow-ups, from them in response to my paper feedback and then usually from me back to them with a few follow-ups to the follow-up, are quick and small moments in the arc of the semester, outside of the official work of the class and easily forgotten once the semester is complete. I hope the students won’t forget, but I can promise you I won’t, as these moments help me feel a bit of that classroom conversation and community that can sometimes be hard to come by in online course.

Last recap tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Responses to this moment or other Fall 2021 reflections you’d share?

December 15, 2021: Fall Semester Recaps: English Studies Capstone

[This Fall was another extremely exhausting semester, and first and foremost I’m proud of all of us for making it through. But it also featured moments that reminded me of why we do what we do, and in this recap series I wanted to highlight one such moment from each of my Fall classes. I’d love to hear your best and your hardest moments, and everything in between, from Fall 2021!]

On an inspiring chat that exemplified the broader conversations into which our graduating English Studies Majors are moving.

There are lots of reasons why I love teaching our English Studies Capstone course, including the chance to read the students’ culminating portfolios (I know of no better way to get a truly comprehensive sense of a student’s work, voice, interests, skills, perspective, identity, and more). But I think my favorite part of this course is the opportunity to work with students who are right on the cusp of not being students (or at least not undergraduates) any more, who are really taking the final steps to becoming peers of mine in every sense across this semester together. When I teach in our grad program or in our program for vocational educators, those students are almost all fellow educators, and thus peers right from the start; when I teach adult learning courses, those students all bring a great deal more life experience to the class than I. But in Capstone, I get to be part of the moment when undergraduate students fully enter that category, and it’s a really awesome thing.

This hasn’t been something purposeful (indeed it’s not something I had consciously thought about until planning this post), but I think that particular timing has a lot to do with why I’ve always chosen shared readings for Capstone by contemporary authors, folks who are (in almost every sense) not only still alive but still working in our own moment. The last time I taught this course, for example, that meant assigning as our Literature Unit reading the first hardcover text I’ve ever asked students to purchase: Monique Truong’s new novel The Sweetest Fruits (2019). This time I decided to go with a group of shorter readings for the Lit Unit, but with the same kind of emphasis: short stories and poems by contemporary authors Danielle Evans, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, Curtis Sittenfeld, Jericho Brown, and Claudia Rankine.

The students seemed to love those works and authors as much as I do (Johnson’s “Control Negro,” now the centerpiece of her acclaimed debut collection My Monticello, is quite simply the best 21st century short story I’ve ever read), but even more special was our work with the contemporary text I assigned for the Education Unit this time around: Kevin Gannon’s Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto (2020). Gannon’s text is plenty great on its own terms, but he was kind enough to join us remotely for our final discussion, to answer student questions and put his voice and ideas in conversation with ours, and especially with theirs. And that’s the key—that this group of future (but the very near future) educators, writers, creators, public scholars were very much in conversation with such an important and inspiring voice. If that’s not the kind of moment that reminds us of why we do what we do, I’m not sure what ever could be.

Next recap tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Responses to this moment or other Fall 2021 reflections you’d share?

December 14, 2021: Fall Semester Recaps: Honors Lit Seminar

[This Fall was another extremely exhausting semester, and first and foremost I’m proud of all of us for making it through. But it also featured moments that reminded me of why we do what we do, and in this recap series I wanted to highlight one such moment from each of my Fall classes. I’d love to hear your best and your hardest moments, and everything in between, from Fall 2021!]

On an unplanned discussion that turned into one of my favorites in any class.

In my Semester Previews post on my Honors Literature Seminar on America in the Gilded Age, I highlighted the ways in which, over my handful of sections teaching this course since Fall 2015, contemporary 21st century contexts and connections that had initially been “unspoken” have become more and more overt and even central to our class conversations. Of course our main focus remains on texts (and related histories and themes) from the late 19th century era known as the Gilded Age, but in recent years (not only in this class by any means, but certainly specifically in this one) I’ve become more and more comfortable making overt the 21st century parallels, legacies, and continuities that are everywhere across this time period and course.

Generally those contemporary connections are ones I plan ahead of time (unless they’re shared by an individual student in the course of a discussion, anyway), but this semester I decided on the spot to frame a question around them, and I couldn’t be happier that I did so. We were starting our second three-week thematic Unit, on Gilded Age texts and histories around women’s experiences, identities, and rights, and I decided to open the Unit’s first class by asking directly for examples of things in our own moment and society (from the smallest to the biggest issues) that are different for women than for men. I made clear that we should hear first from the many women in the class (or as many of them as wanted to share, that is), but that men’s perspectives and contributions would of course be welcome as well as the discussion went along.

I run discussion-based classes across the board, and have been doing so for all of my 17 years at FSU (that’s between 8-10 classes per year, so you do the math), so I when I say that this one of the best and most multi-vocal discussions I’ve ever been part of, you know that’s a very meaningful superlative. It’s not just that almost every student in the class spoke up, including many who were a bit more quiet for our discussions generally, though that is true and was really impressive (especially for a professor whose stated goal is bringing out every student voice). It’s that they had things to say that were equal parts personal and analytical, highlighting their own individual experiences but linking them to broader frames and issues effectively and thoughtfully throughout. The discussion not only made clear how the Unit’s Gilded Age issues echo into our own moment, but really set the stage for every subsequent class and conversation in that Unit. Here’s to contemporary connections!

Next recap tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Responses to this moment or other Fall 2021 reflections you’d share?

December 13, 2021: Fall Semester Recaps: First Year Experience Seminar

[This Fall was another extremely exhausting semester, and first and foremost I’m proud of all of us for making it through. But it also featured moments that reminded me of why we do what we do, and in this recap series I wanted to highlight one such moment from each of my Fall classes. I’d love to hear your best and your hardest moments, and everything in between, from Fall 2021!]

On a discussion that balanced skills and content as well as any I’ve ever been part of.

This was my first time teaching FSU’s new First Year Experience seminar, and I wrote back in my Semester Previews series about my goal of featuring a consistent thread of content (around the topic of cultural representations of #BlackLivesMatter) despite the course’s overarching and important emphasis on student skills (as framed by a Reading Apprenticeship approach). Finding that balance between content and skills within my overall student-centered pedagogy has been both a challenge and a priority for all of my classes for many years now. But the particular nature of the challenge here, in a class so fully dedicated to preparing students for all of their experiences in college, was one of many things that was new and different about FYE from any other course I’ve taught.

I can’t say that I really figured out how to achieve that balance consistently in this first version of FYE, and I’m excited to have the chance to teach the course at least one or two more times over the next couple Fall semesters. But this week’s Semester Recaps are focused on moments that did work, and there was one particular class discussion that really exemplified the balance I’ll work to achieve more regularly in my future FYE sections. After many weeks working with written texts in a variety of genres (nonfiction including memoir, journalism, and scholarly analysis; creative literature including fiction and poetry) I wanted them to spend a couple weeks practicing analyzing multimedia texts, and so we watched the same pair of recent cultural works that I’ve used in my First Year Writing II sections for a few years: the film Fruitvale Station and the Black-ish Season 2 episode “Hope.”

I love both of those texts, and it was fun to share them with this new group of students, who seemed to enjoy them a great deal as well. But I have to admit I wasn’t sure how much we’d have to say about Fruitvalewhen we returned to class discussions (after portions of two class periods spent watching the film) to engage with it. Which made the discussion that ensued one of the most surprising as well as one of the best I’ve ever been around. Students highlighted a wide range of analytical lenses for working with multimedia texts, from camera angles and sound editing to choices in the screenplay and the acting performances, among others. And they used those analytical lenses to raise a number of important elements of the film’s themes, its portrayals of identity and community, race and racism, the real historical figures and events that inspired it, and more. I’ve never had a discussion balance analytical skills and content more successfully, a moment that modeled not just why we teach a class like FYE, but what we’re aiming to do in every classroom.

Next recap tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Responses to this moment or other Fall 2021 reflections you’d share?

December 11-12, 2021: Pearl Harbor Histories: Remembering Infamous Days

[December 7thmarks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ve remembered and AmericanStudied some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to this special post on how we remember such infamous days.]

On the complex, challenging, and crucial question of how we remember our infamous days.

Few presidential statements have been proven as accurate by the subsequent decades as Franklin Roosevelt’s description of December 7th, 1941 as “a date which will live in infamy.”  We have a fair number of national memory days of one kind or another, of course, but I can’t think of another that remembers anything that’s anywhere near as explicitly negative and destructive as does National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day (although of course Columbus Day would qualify from the counter-argument side). The only potential equivalent would be September 11th, which doesn’t currently have an official remembrance day but likely will get there—and for that reason, along with many others, it’s worth considering how we remember an event like Pearl Harbor, and what the stakes are.

In the Atlantic essay that I hyperlinked under “likely will get there,” historian, educator, and public scholar Kevin Levin argues that, as the essay’s synopsis puts it, “Over time, our memory of national catastrophes becomes less personal and more nuanced.” But Levin’s comparison for September 11th is to our national memories of the Civil War, and I would argue that there’s an overt and key difference between that horrific event and either 9/11 or Pearl Harbor: everyone involved in the Civil War was an American (whether they wanted to admit it at the time or not), and so after the event it became and has continued for the next 150 years to be important (for better and for worse reasons) for us to find ways to produce more nuanced and less divisive memories of it. Obviously there are American communities of which we could say the same when it comes to Pearl Harbor (ie, Japanese Internment) and 9/11 (the anti-Muslim backlash), but the fact remains that those infamous events were caused by nations and entities outside of America, and so it’s entirely possible for us to continue to define them through a more explicitly divided, us vs. them frame.

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, or at least not absolutely—Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were both, in their definitely distinct ways, attacks on the United States by such external forces, and there’s no way we can or should try to remember them outside of such a frame. While I would certainly emphasize remembering those who were lost in the attacks, rather than focusing our attention on the attackers, that shift wouldn’t change the fundamental frame so much as (potentially) produce different emotional responses to it (mourning rather than anger, for example). This 2016 Obama White House statement on National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day illustrates this kind of emphasis and emotion nicely, I’d say. But to come back to Levin’s argument, I would agree with him that more nuance—more understanding of the multiple perspectives and histories contained in an event, and the various and often competing causes and elements that lead up to it, and the equally varied and in many cases still unfolding results—should always be part of our goal for such remembrance as well. That it’s far more difficult to reach for such nuance when it comes to these external attacks (compared to the Civil War) only makes the effort that much more valuable.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 10, 2021: Pearl Harbor Histories: The Film

[December 7thmarks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how we remember such infamous days.]

On the uses and abuses of history in Michael Bay’s most serious blockbuster.

First, let’s stop for a moment and acknowledge the basic impressiveness of the fact that the director of Bad Boys (and sequels), Transformers (and sequels), The Rock, Armageddon, and the like made a historical epic summer blockbuster film about the Pearl Harbor bombing and its World War II aftermaths. Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) came out in July (three years prior to Bay’s film) and so I suppose would qualify as a summer blockbuster, but it was still Spielberg, and the post-Schindler and Amistad Spielberg at that—nothing surprising about a historical epic from that guy. But from the man who at the time was rumored to be in production with both Transformers 4and Bad Boys 3? Again, worth noting and, at a baseline level, admiring.

Moreover, it’d be pretty silly to critique Bay’s film for making a friendship and a love triangle central to its plotlines. After all, that’s the nature of the genre I’ve elsewhere dubbed period fiction—works of art that set universal human stories against a backdrop of (often) impressively realized historical moments. While those of us who care deeply about the histories themselves might be frustrated that such works relegate them to the background, it would be just as possible to argue the opposite: that works of period fiction help modern audiences connect to their historical subjects through engaging and accessible human characters, stories, and themes. After all, none other than the godfather of historical fiction, Sir Walter Scott, could be said to have done precisely that in the creation of characters like Waverlyand Ivanhoe. Yes, I just compared Michael Bay to Sir Walter Scott, and I stand by it.

On the other hand, I would argue that if a piece of period fiction is set in wartime, it owes its audience at the very least an equally compelling and affecting portrayal of war: Saving Private Ryan, whatever its flaws, certainly offers that, especially in the opening sequence linked above; Gone with the Wind, more flawed still, is nonetheless at its best in depicting the Civil War and particularly the destruction of Atlanta. Thanks to its sizeable budget and state-of-the-art special effects, Pearl Harbor is able to include an extended depiction of that bombing, among many other battle sequences—yet to my mind (and you can judge for yourself at that link) it fails utterly at capturing any of the brutalities or terrors, or any other aspects, of war. The problem isn’t that the director of Transformers is making a wartime historical epic—it’s that the wartime historical epic doesn’t feel noticeably different from any other action film in his oeuvre.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

December 9, 2021: Pearl Harbor Histories: The Varsity Victory Volunteers

[December 7thmarks National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, so this week I’ll remember and AmericanStudy some histories related to the 1941 attack. Leading up to a special post on how we remember such infamous days.]

On a post-Pearl Harbor group who embody the best of the war, Hawai’i, and America.

I learned a great deal while researching and writing my fifth book, We the People: The 500-Year Battle Over Who is American (2019). I had a general sense of the exclusionary and inclusive histories I wanted to highlight in each chapter, having talked about most of them in a number of settings over the last couple years; but in the course of working on each chapter I discovered new histories related to those central threads, stories that surprised me yet also and especially exemplified my topics and themes. So it went with Chapter 7: Everything Japanese Internment Got Wrong: I knew that I wanted to focus in that chapter on Japanese American World War II soldiers as a central, inclusive challenge to the exclusionary histories and narratives of the internment policy and camps; but it was only when researching those respective World War II communities further that I learned about the amazing, inspiring, foundational story of the Varsity Victory Volunteers (VVV).

There were quite simply too many Japanese Americans in Hawai’i (and they were too integral to the community’s economy and society) for internment camps to be possible. But the island featured its own forms of World War II anti-Japanese discrimination to be sure, and it was out of one such discriminatory moment that the VVV was born. The day of the Pearl Harbor attacks, all of the island’s ROTC students were called up for active duty as the newly constituted Hawaii Territorial Guard (HTG). But when federal officials learned that Japanese American students were among those numbers, they dismissed those students from service, deeming them 4C (“enemy aliens”) and thus ineligible to serve. Frustrated by this treatment, many of the students met with Hung Wai Ching, a Chinese Hawaiian community leader who had become an ally to the group. On his advice they drafted a letter to the territory’s military governor, Delos Emmons, which read in part: “We joined the Guard voluntarily with the hope that this was one way to serve our country in her time of need. Needless to say, we were deeply disappointed when we were told that our services in the Guard were no longer needed. Hawaii is our home; the United States, our country. We know but one loyalty and that is to the Stars and Stripes. We wish to do our part as loyal Americans in every way possible and we hereby offer ourselves for whatever service you may see fit to use us.”

Emmons accepted the VVV’s offer, and in February 1942 they were constituted as a labor battalion (attached to the 34th Combat Engineers) and assigned to Schofield Barracks. Over the next year they would contribute both their labor and their presence to the community there, becoming such an integral part of its operations and society that when Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy visited in December 1942 (escorted by none other than Hung Wai Ching), he was struck by the VVV in particular. Not at all coincidentally, in January 1943 the War Department reversed its policy and allowed Japanese Americans to serve in the armed forces; the VVV requested permission to disband so they could volunteer, and nearly all of the VVV members ended up in the 442ndRegimental Combat Team, the all-Japanese unit that would become the most decorated in American military history. I knew about the 442ndbefore I wrote the chapter and book, but I had never heard of the VVV—and I know of few stories that exemplify the best of American military, social, and cultural history more fully than does this post-Pearl Harbor, volunteer Japanese American student community.

Last post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?