On The Outside Looking In: Writing and Teaching about Groups Not Your Own

Dialogue On The Outside Looking In: Writing and Teaching about Groups Not Your Own Nupur Chaudhuri Introduction to the Coordinating Council for Women in History Panel presented at the 1996 American Historical Association Meeting The last several years have seen a radical shift in our instructional process, with scholars from various disciplines including disparate cultural contents in their teaching and research work. Like other scholars, many historians are also using multiple variables like gender, class, ethnicity , and race in their teaching and research, a process which in 1991 Darlene Clark Hine caUed "crossover history." Justifying the need for crossover history, Hine declared, "When we are all doing each other's history, then we will register meaningful progress in the war against racism, sexism, and class oppression."1 More recently, this process has been described as "border crossing."2 Nowadays, we often find that when writing and/or teaching about groups and employing a conceptual model based on differences , the historian may not belong to the particular group under consideration . However, in taking multicultural perspectives, those historians have the opportunity to be constructing, reconstructing, strengthening, defying, or changing our ideas about race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity , and nationality in the field of history. This postmodern scholarship gives historians "the power to represent, the power to name, the power to write history and shape knowledge, and the power to ask questions that have not previously been asked."3 This new pedagogy encouraged the Coordinating Council for Women in History to propose a panel to the American Historical Association meeting in January 1996 entitled "On the Outside Looking In: Writing and Teaching about Groups Not Your Own." The collection of papers presented here were delivered by members of that panel. The legitimacy of teaching about or researching a group to which a scholar does not belong has been questioned by some who cite the possibiUty of misinterpretation and misunderstanding.4 However, accepting that information is mediated through one's own social identity and that each person is responsible for her or his statements, a scholar can do such teaching and research.5 Being sensitive to this concern, all five panelists © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 3 (Fall) 144 Journal of Women's History Fall describe how their personal experiences and ethnic and national identities created their own particular awareness about the groups and cultures they studied and taught. The same sort of declaration of perspective also needs to occur in our teaching, particularly but not exclusively when addressing groups different from ourselves. Steve Norwood concentrates on studying and writing; Christina Simmons discusses both research and teaching; and Barbara Winslow focuses on teaching and interaction with students of different ethnic and racial backgrounds and national origins. Recent years have seen the diversification of the student body in American higher education: between 1980 and 1990, 23 percent more Native-American, 13 percent more African-American, 66 percent more Hispanic American and almost 100 percent Asian-American/Pacific Islanders enroUed in the institutions of higher learning. In addition, more students are foreign-born and English is their second language.6 These demographics are represented in the classes of Barbara Winslow, a white woman who taught African-American history at Cuyahoga Community College and Cleveland State University. Currently, she is teaching history at Medgar Evers College, where the majority of students are of African descent from the English- and French-speaking Caribbean. Winslow describes her students' reactions to a white faculty member and her interactions with them. New fields of history develop in hard won battles initially fought primarily by members of the group being studied. Thus, women's history developed out of early efforts made by female historians. Yet once any field is established, it attracts wider interest, and women's history now involves male historians. Steve Norwood has studied working-class women. His grandmother had been a labor organizer; he himself is a union member. This family connection helped him to get interviews with aged women union members which many middleclass women could not get. To these elderly women, he was an insider despite his gender, because of his union connection. Together they shared a common perspective. Scholarship developing histories of...