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165 5 New Visions, New Traditions The Female Teacher and Rhetorical Education in the Twenty-First Century Unfortunately, too often our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they “succeeded” in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves. By such a measure, virtually every radical movement failed because the basic power relations it sought to change remain pretty much intact. And yet it is precisely those alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to continue to struggle for change. —Robin D. G. Kelley, “Finding the Strength to Love and Dream,” 2002 Robin D. G. Kelley’s message in the June 2002 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education speaks directly to the pedagogical arguments made by Lydia Maria Child, Zitkala-Ša, Jovita Idar, Marta Peña, and Leonor Villegas de Magnón, as well as the project of this final chapter. It is clear that the five teachers in this study did not change the world or even drastically alter educational policy in 1865, 1900, or 1911. Child’s text did not revolutionize civic participation for her black readers in the post–Civil War era. Zitkala-Ša’s essays did not close down Carlisle or effectively challenge what it meant to “civilize” the Indian. And the messages the teachers of La Crónica sent did not enable their readers to create a cultural citizenship that was recognized and respected across the United States, in Texas, or even inside the city of Laredo. One could say that these women and the rhetorical educations they proposed were failures. But if Kelley’s point above is taken seriously, the “visions and dreams” of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas should energize the work of teachers and scholars in rhetoric and composition today. As I have argued in the preceding chapters, the individual practices these teachers invoked not only refigure historical perceptions of the docile and 166 New Visions, New Traditions apolitical female teacher but also connect with and revise traditional understandings of rhetorical education. The project of this final chapter is to take a step back and view these teachers’ arguments together to see how they might enrich contemporary discussions in rhetoric and composition. As I close this study, my objective is to listen to the ways Child, Zitkala- Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas speak in unison to scholars and teachers today. More particularly, my aim is to show how their work extends historical and historiographic discussions concerning feminist rhetoric and rhetorical education; complicates and revises the feminized figure of the turn-ofthe -twentieth-century teacher as well as the work of today’s rhetoric and composition instructor; and offers new ways for scholars and teachers to envision a rhetorical education for the twenty-first century. Thus, the goal of this final chapter is to discuss how this study as a whole contributes to scholarly conversations that intersect with, but differ from, those engaged in previous chapters. In making this move, I do not advocate that scholars and teachers simply adopt the work of the women examined here. Instead, these educators’ individual and collective struggles should inspire us to rethink a variety of disciplinary practices, as they should prompt us, in Kelley’s words, to “tap the well of our collective imaginations” (B8) and build on these “alternative visions and dreams” when we “continue to struggle for change” (B7). Remembering the Female Teacher This study contributes to feminist histories of rhetoric by examining how five women resisted the prescribed gendered and cultural duties of the nineteenth - and early twentieth-century teacher. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 illustrate how dominant discourses of education created and re-created definitions of the teacher’s work by calling on women like Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas to be soldiers who went south to continue the Northern fight, or members of yet another army who were sent out to “kill the Indian but save the man,” or Americanizers who transformed their Mexican students into true “Americans.” From the American Missionary to the Texas School Journal, these discourses dictated that teachers of black, Indian, and Mexican students were not to create new knowledge, let alone speak back to educational systems. Such teachers were expected only to reproduce the approved pedagogical message. The women in this study contested these dominant expectations by creating and deploying arguments that revised the mandates of educational discourse. Through their politicized pedagogies , these teachers reframed the...

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