Going Public: Teaching and Learning in the Community

Writing America: Classroom Literary and Public Engagement. Edited by Sarah Robbins and Mimi Dyer. New York: Teachers College Press, 2005. 179 pages. $21.95 (paper).

A few years ago, in a meeting to discuss an idea for a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar, a colleague and I were told by a program officer that our proposal would never receive funding, because it was too political. What triggered her comment? Our focus on the now well-worn triad "race, class, and gender." We were at once dismayed at the comment and appreciative that someone would tell us this up front and save us the effort of continuing to work on an apparently doomed proposal. I remembered that experience last year when I saw the listing in the ASA conference program for a session on a project called "Keeping and Creating American Communities." That, I said to myself, sounds like the kind of thing the NEH would have loved—old-fashioned, conservative, idealistic. But two colleagues who had been involved in the project encouraged me to attend and promised that I'd like what I heard. And I did—so much, in fact, that I have adapted (okay, plagiarized) the model for a project in my own community.

Keeping and Creating American Communities (KCAC) might be described as conservative in the sense that it emphasizes the idea(l) of community, a concept that some view as masking the persistence of power structures and cultural divisions. But beneath a discourse that does, at times, paint "community" in overly rosy terms, KCAC models strategies for exploring the tensions that complicate community life, as well as for analyzing the difficulties of representing diverse and often conflicting community experiences, and it provides an innovative approach to organizing learning, for both teachers and students. KCAC shows us what American studies scholarship and teaching could be, if only we were willing to put learning and experimentation at the core of our work, if only we were willing to view both K-12 teachers and our own students as full partners, and if only we could, in this era of globalization and neoliberal critique, comfortably take the local as seriously as we take the national and global.

The three-year project based at Kennesaw State University involved more than two dozen K-12 and college teachers in Georgia, who first conducted their own community-based research projects and then developed assignments that would engage their students in investigations of the history, geography, and cultures of their communities. The project's core goal was to incorporate community into the curriculum by taking students out of the classroom and into their neighborhoods and towns. Organizers emphasized literacy as a social activity, encompassing not simply reading and writing but inquiry, research, interaction, and communication with real audiences. The project aimed not only to study community but also to build it, among the teachers, among students, and between students and the people in the areas they studied. In Writing America: Classroom Literacy and Public Engagement, the project's organizers, participants, and observers reflect on the challenge of connecting American studies with our communities. The bulk of the book is a series of "teacher stories" about how specific assignments worked in K-12 and college classrooms. In telling these stories, the authors make their work visible and useful. At the same time, albeit indirectly, Writing America suggests that we should change how we think about teaching, learning, and community engagement in American studies.

KCAC involved three clear phases. First, participants explored their own questions about the communities in which they teach. Working together, the group identified central themes that explicitly linked national and local issues. The national themes were broad and some might even say a bit vague: "educating for citizenship," "cultivating homelands," and "shifting landscapes, converging peoples." The local versions, however, brought into focus important issues in Georgia today: suburban sprawl, changing racial and class demographics, and how communities think about...