Introduction

We are proud of the leadership role New Jersey has played in the national movement to transform our schools’ curricula so as to include appropriate attention to the scholarship on women and issues of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and heterosexism.

—Paula Rothenberg, Director, New Jersey Project, writing in the first issue of Transformations, 1990

Opening Transformations’ first issue means stepping into another world. It’s a world where educators were passionate about making more students feel included in the classroom, and making sure that what they learned was about a fuller world, not just the doings of straight white men. The contributors were struggling to figure out how to integrate inclusiveness into their teaching, beginning with a transformation of the curriculum. Twenty-five years later, when state funding for public higher education has been drastically and continually cut back, it seems extraordinary that the state of New Jersey—responding to grassroots organizing and strong advocacy—allotted funds to a statewide project focused on public education. From our current standpoint, when including attention to scholarship on issues of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and heterosexism is often dismissed as intolerable political correctness, that such an initiative should foreground teaching around diversity and inclusiveness seems even more remote. Nevertheless, for seventeen years the New Jersey Project on Inclusive Scholarship, Curriculum, and Teaching supported an annual conference, a speaker series, and on-campus faculty development opportunities. Transformations was the official journal of the project. Even after the New Jersey Project ended in 2006, the conversations it sparked have continued in the journal. Since 2004, the journal has fittingly been supported and published by New Jersey City University—a public university serving mostly first-generation college students, located in one the most diverse urban centers in the United States.

And though these earlier issues of the journal seem to come from a more optimistic world, a world more confident that good changes would be happening in education, it was also a world of silences. The “Feminist Pedagogy Bibliography” compiled by Lauren Granit for the first issue has only seven books listed, though it is followed by five pages of articles. There is nothing in the bibliography by bell hooks, nothing by Lisa Delpit, nothing by Chandra Mohanty. As Paul Lauter reminds us in his contribution to the current issue, the Heath Anthology of American Literature was just starting at the same time, so its resources were not yet available in literature classrooms.

In this anniversary issue, we wanted to honor the roots of Transformations and the pioneering efforts of its founders, editors, contributors, and readers. We begin with a series of reflections from past editors and current Advisory Board members. The journal’s first editor, Sylvia Baer, locates the beginnings of the journal in the context of feminist scholarship and pedagogy, as does Advisory Board member Elizabeth Minnich. Both tie its mission to activist struggles from the 1970s and 1980s and their manifestations on college campuses. Juda Bennett beautifully describes the cooperative, DIY nature of the editing process in those early days. Bennett and his editing partner Elizabeth Paul note the changes precipitated by technological developments and by the changing political dynamics in higher education. Bennett intersects his reflections on his role as editor with various power dynamics as they play out in academia—in encounters between graduate students and senior faculty, and between conference presenters who challenge race and gender hierarchies and audience members who’d just as soon stick with the status quo. Elizabeth Paul, too, connects Transformations to changing institutional dynamics. From her current position as an administrator, she describes how diversity and inclusiveness are fundamental to both pedagogical and administrative practices. Board member Kurt Spellmeyer reflects more generally on the concept of transformation within the world of humanist learning. Henry Giroux and Paul Lauter place Transformations within a wider context of inclusive scholarship and connect the journal’s work to wider political contexts including the 2016 presidential race. AnaLouise Keating and John Kellermeier reflect on the inclusive teaching practices that are fundamental to Transformations’ mission. As a Transformations reader in the Netherlands, board member Berteke Waaldijk describes the journal’s transnational...