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Esther Kingston-Mann 2 Three Steps Forward, One Step Back Dilemmas of Upward Mobility Initiation HAVING LEARNED from my unschooled parents that the world of academe was a Promised Land of wisdom and rational discourse, I arrived at my first scholarly conference in 1973 with high expectations . A fast-talking, dark-haired, working-class woman of Eastern European Jewish background, I hoped against hope that there was nothing about my style or manner that would signal to this predominantly male and middle-class gathering in a luxury hotel that I did not belong.1 At my first conference session, I sat in the back of the room, awed by the camaraderie of men in dark suits and ties, who nodded casually to people they knew as if standing in a position of authority before an audience of scholars was nothing special. I listened intently and was surprised to find the presentations easy to follow and not very challenging. The moderator then opened the discussion by calling on the men he knew by their first names. The spirited repartee that followed was exclusively male. We [the women] did not meet each other’s eyes; a few raised their hands and eventually lowered them. But I, enraged at such injustice in my newfound world of Reason, continued to wave my hand in the air. The moderator looked at me blankly and proceeded to call on several more men. Then, glancing to the right and left and seeing no other hands raised, he slowly nodded in my direction. By this time, I was incoherent with anger and could not even manage to formulate my question. Not an auspicious debut. My contribution to the conference session was to reinforce whatever stereotypes those present may have already had about the irrational and unsocialized lower-class females in their midst. 36 I doubt if anyone saw a connection between my incoherence and the structure of that workshop session. It was three years before I was willing to try again—much better defended this time and accompanied by a supportive colleague. But this painful and embarrassing initiation into the world of scholars turned out to be one of the most illuminating sources of insight into the teaching/ learning process at UMass/Boston. Like many of my students, I had failed in an encounter with powerful structures established to value and reward individuals who most resembled those already in authority. Although I had always been praised for my verbal skills, it had taken less than an hour for a conference workshop to teach me how to become incoherent and inarticulate. My deficiencies were not inborn; they were site specific. In my graduate training at Johns Hopkins University, silence was a learned response to what were to me puzzling academic hierarchies and intellectual exclusions. As a historian-to-be in the late 1960s, I was exposed to intellectually stimulating but narrow conceptions of historical knowledge—a background text entitled History of the Modern World turned out to be a history of Europe, women and working-class people were absent from the assigned readings, and none of my professors seemed to notice these omissions. As Ronald Takaki has suggested in another context, studying history was for me like looking in a mirror and seeing nothing. Aware of my graduate student status, I did not question the professors who chose these exclusionary texts, lectured about their universal significance and applicability, and delighted most in students who invited them to explore more deeply the narrow track of understanding they had laid out. Better, I thought, to remain silent and bide my time until I could find a place to speak more freely—at my first scholarly conference, for example. Or at least so I thought then. As a junior faculty member at UMass/Boston, it seemed to me that if my students were to learn to respect and develop their intellectual powers and to claim their places in a wider world without inordinate pain and suffering, their learning experiences would have to differ pretty dramatically from my own. It was clear to me that I needed to learn how to teach in a manner that differed from those who had taught me. What follows is a story of my search for such knowledge in the lessons of outsider experience and in the challenges, support, and insight I received from students and faculty colleagues. Three Steps Forward, One Step Back 37 [3.140.198.173] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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