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Introduction Listening to Our Elders Samantha Blackmon, Cristina Kirklighter, Steve Parks “The real enemy is ignorance, and we can work together to combat ignorance with knowledge” Charlotte Brooks, 1976 Origins In 1979, J.N. Hook, Executive Secretary of National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) from 1954–1960, published A Long Way Together: A Personal View of NCTE’s First Sixty-Seven Years. His description of the new voices and identities in one of his latter chapters, titled “Human Equation, 1968–1978,” marked the early days when identity based groups and activists began writing, speaking, and working for change that not only changed the face of NCTE but the nation with their identity-based initiatives and revolutionary ideas.As an identity-based collective,our “long way together” for the most part began in the ‘60s, and it has been a long, challenging, and uplifting historical road of heartaches and breakthroughs. In 2011, our “profession” will turn one hundred years old, at least if we mark our beginnings as the formation of NCTE. Still, it is probably more accurate to say that our profession is endlessly beginning, constantly changing its identity and purpose as new voices and identities claim their rights in our classrooms and in our country.The recognition of such claims, however, does not occur without a struggle, without collective work. Listening to our Elders attempts to capture the history of those collective moments where teachers across grade levels and institutions of higher education organized amongst themselves and sometimes with other organizations to insure that the voices, heritages, and traditions of their students and colleagues were recognized within our professional organizations as a vital part of our classrooms and our discipline. As will be detailed in the chapters that follow, this recognition was not always easily given. Instead, whether the issue was race, gender, sexuality, language, class, or disability, committed activist organizations have often had to push against the existing limits of our field and its organizations to insure that a broader sense of common responsibility and humanity was recognized. In part, then, this book records those moments when the field did not live up to its highest ideals—those attitudes and practices which acted to exclude the insights of its broad disciplinary membership: Listening to Our Elders 2 • Louie Crew tells about openly homophobic comments made at a session of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and the emergence of a “queer identity” in the field. • James Hill discusses the history and formation of the Black Caucus, highlighting its work on such issues as the “Students’ Right To Their Own Language” among other accomplishments . • Jeffery Paul Chan talks about how textbooks companies failed to represent the diversity of Asian/Asian American experiences , leading to a manifesto being delivered by himself and Frank Chin—the classic “Racist Love.” • William Thelin and Bill Macauley speak to the ways in which working-class teachers lacked place to develop progressive pedagogies, research agendas, and outreach projects to support working class writers. • Geneva Smitherman speaks to the ways in which language rights at NCTE and CCCC were enmeshed in national movements for political, educational, and economic rights, highlighting moments such as the “Students’ Right To Their Own Language” and the California “Ebonics” debate. • Malea Powell and Joyce Rain Anderson speak to the need to develop strong support networks for young scholars committed to expanding the scope and range of American Indian scholarship. • Jay Dolmage, Patricia Dunn, Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Sushil Oswal, and Brenda Brueggeman write about how the profession has struggled to see issues of access and disability as a central part of our institutional, pedagogical, and professional work. • Louise Dunlap reminds us how space needed to be created to insure a working-class politics that reached an alliance with non-academic workers in the struggle for economic justice. • Speaking across distinct time periods, Carlota Cárdenas de Dwyer and Victor Villanueva’s work reminds us how our field has failed to create systemic supports to insure a diverse teaching and research faculty in our field. Yet what is most important about these individual stories is how they initiated a collective response, how they led to special interest groups, caucuses , and task force committees designed not only to study but to change 3 Introduction the very conditions described above. These individual examples, that is, are not meant to represent the lone individual against the “machine.” Rather they represent the labor of these individuals, in concert with many others, to form the...

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