Making Emends: Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Anne Bradstreet

The introduction explains the historical moment in which Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich were teaching. It provides background information on the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program and CUNY’s open admissions policy. It also describes the book’s methodology, which combines a feminist approach to archival research with literary analysis. Situating their teaching within longer histories of social justice pedagogies (including traditions of Progressive, radical, Black liberatory, and Black feminist pedagogies, Freedom Schools, Black studies, and women’s studies), the introduction posits that these writers were theorists and practitioners of student-centered and feminist pedagogy. It also highlights two major patterns in their teaching: they redistributed classroom power to students and facilitated student knowledge production (especially through the publication of student writing). Finally, the introduction illustrates how teaching at CUNY shaped their writing and twentieth-century US literature more broadly. These classrooms gave rise to new literary forms, “the genres of open admissions”—the classroom lyric, the campus essay, and the anthology of student writing—and many insights associated with intersectional feminism.

Introduction

2024

Toni Cade Bambara's Community-Controlled and Multimodal Pedagogy

2024

This chapter explores how, in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) program, Toni Cade Bambara, Barbara Christian, and Addison Gayle developed student-centered teaching methods to empower educationally disenfranchised students. Among their many creative approaches, it focuses on two dimensions of Bambara’s teaching. First, it illustrates how she developed a community-controlled pedagogy that involved students in collective decision-making about their learning. Second, it shows how she developed what is now called a “multimodal” or “multimedia” pedagogy that taught students to compose in different media, genres, and forms. This chapter also recovers the classroom context of Bambara’s landmark anthology The Black Woman (1970), which she edited while teaching at City College. The final section follows Bambara beyond the era of open admissions to show how she continued developing these methods both in universities (Duke University, Carleton College, and the University of Delaware) and in local community organizations like Philadelphia’s Scribe Video Center, where her teaching could more effectively serve Black communities.

“This Class … Has Much to Teach America”

2024

This chapter shows how, beginning at City College and with the Teachers and Writers Collaborative (and later at Sarah Lawrence, Yale University, SUNY Stony Brook, and the University of California, Berkeley, especially her famous Poetry for the People program), June Jordan developed a public and project-based pedagogy that encouraged students to use what they learned in the service of social change. It focuses, in particular, on Jordan’s and Toni Cade Bambara’s shared practice of publishing student writing. It also considers the products of that pedagogy, including nearly a dozen anthologies of student writing that they edited throughout their careers. Considered alongside their teaching archives, these anthologies demonstrate how classrooms have been central for not only the reception and dissemination of American literature but also its production.