"I stay a little bit angry": Portrait of Helen Lewis, Activist Teacher

ARTICLE "I stay a little bit angry": Portrait of Helen Lewis, Activist Teacher________________ Libby Falk Jones Helen Lewis could easily be called the grandmother of Appalachian Studies. She taught the very first Appalachian Studies courses ever offered anywhere back in the 1970s while she was at Clinch Valley College (now the University of Virginia at Wise) and also hosted the very first Appalachian Studies Conference in 1971. She is so xvell known as a supporter of community activism that the Appalachian Studies Association, which she served as President in 2001-2002, has named their annual service award after her. She holds not only honorary degreesfrom Emory & Henry College and Wake Forest University but an earned doctorate in Sociology from the University ofKentucky and has taught at more than halfa dozen Appalachian colleges and universities. She also served as Director of the Appalachian Center at Berea College in the early 1990s and on the staffof the Highlander Center before and after that. Characteristically collaborative, Helen Lewis is a co-author of several important books, including Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case (Appalachian Consortium Press, 1978), It Comes from the People: Community Development and Local Theology (Temple University Press, 1995) and Mountain Sisters: From Convent to Community in Appalachia (University Press ofKentucky, 2003). Her many pamphlets include Participatory Education and Grassroots Development and The Jellico Handbook: A Teacher's Guide to Community-Based Learning. Now in her 80s, Helen Lewis lives in North Georgia where she currently directs oral history projects for the Byron Herbert Reece Society andfor Fannin County. She also teaches courses at an off-campus center of Toccoa Falls College and for the Divinity School of Wake Forest University. In acknowledgement of her many contributions to the Appalachian region, Helen Lewis recently received Berea College's 2006 Service Award. "I think of myself more as an organizer of students than a teacher," says sociologist Helen Lewis. "I was never short of knowledge, but the knowledge had to be valuable, make people be better citizens or live their lives with more enjoyment. The major interest in all my teachings is not what you know but what you do about it. 52 "1 try to make the students angry, or as angry as I've been," Lewis says. "Anger and love have kept me going. Love can be a real revolutionary. There is a sense in which you care about people and don't like to see people hurt; you believe in equality. It's also feeling angry about a country that does things that you feel betray its own potential: not being democratic, supporting dictators. There's always this sense of outrage." Emotion should lead to responsible action, Lewis thinks. "You have to see that changing the world is a part of what you're supposed to be doing. You aren't supposed to sit back and be comfortable. You can't get to be complacent or accept the kinds of violence we see daily on television—so much hurt, so much killing—it just makes me furious, it's outrageous." Lewis believes that students need to be taught not simply how to get into existing systems and rise within them but how to improve systems, to change systems to better the lives of people. "If you have to go up against the agency you're working for, you should be prepared to do that." Helping students open their minds is a challenge, Lewis has found. The first step, she believes, is acknowledging students' beliefs. For example, she has helped Pentecostal students voice their ideas about holy practices, including snake handling. "In some other classes they would never admit to these things, you know. I make it okay to talk about being a snake handler. I say to the rest of the class, 'you may think of this as sort of a primitive religion but these are the only real literalists in religion today.' I put it in a context of discussing the differences between religious groups—how they started, where they come from, how people change, how you maybe move from one belief system to another, so it's a way of validating where they are but saying it...