Learning from Teaching about Braddock
by VanessaVaile
The question raised here, “Can the classroom be a site of popular struggle and political initiative, or at least a staging ground for these?” also speaks to #CEW2013, but not relegated to just one week of the year.
As an English teacher, I’m interested in the possibilities for active learning through connecting literature, daily life, and historical change. But I’m a political animal as well as a professor, and these are urgent times. So I was struck by a quote from the late labor historian David Montgomery. In an interview with Radical History Review, he said: “In this country, where the talents needed to run a humane society are all around us, what we need is not a single party but many self-activated centers of popular struggle and a variety of political initiatives. And all those centers of activity need to learn from history.”
Which has me asking myself: Can the classroom be a site of popular struggle and political initiative, or at least a staging ground for these? How can we, students and teachers, learn from history? And what should we be learning?
I regularly teach a course…
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As the Adjunctiverse Turns 