Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women's Cross-Cultural Teaching(The New Public Scholarship)

Learning Legacies explores the history of cross-cultural teaching approaches, to highlight how women writer-educators used stories about their collaborations to promote community-building. Robbins demonstrates how educators used stories that resisted dominant conventions and expectations about learners to navigate cultural differences. Using case studies of educational initiatives on behalf of African American women, Native American children, and the urban poor, Learning Legacies promotes the importance of knowledge grounded in the histories and cultures of the many racial and ethnic groups that have always comprised America’s populace, underscoring the value of rich cultural knowledge in pedagogy by illustrating how creative teachers still draw on these learning legacies today.

About the Author :
Sarah Ruffing Robbins is a Lorraine Sherley Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University.

Review :
“Robbins pushes the envelope on the normative uses and perspectives about the Archive, using literal archives of educational practice recorded in counter-narratives from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Educators will find value in using this book to help train emerging teachers to be reflective about their practice and for models of how to use texts, archives, and stories as powerful teaching tools . . . ” —Timothy K. Eatman, Associate Professor of Higher Education, Syracuse University, Faculty Co-director Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life “[Learning Legacies] combines knowledge about teacher training and the history of education in the United States gained from extensive research into many formal archives, numerous site visits, and interviews with educators, archivists and others. Robbins’s own autoethnographic reflections also form a crucial and welcome element of her research.” —Sandra A. Zagarell, Donald R. Longman Professor of English at Oberlin College and scholar of American Literature and Culture "I will never have a chance to spend time with the women who attended Spelman College in its very first years, or to visit Hull House right when it was opening, or to meet the Native American students who found ways to survive together as they resisted the boarding schools. But reading Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women’s Cross- Cultural Teaching, I felt connected to these remarkable people and to the scholars who have helped preserve and explain their archives. ... This is brilliant work." -- Legacy "I am invigorated by Robbins’s excellent book, Learning Legacies. She makes clear how examples from the past have inspired pedagogical practices aimed at social justice for those who followed. Indeed, what is likely the most important aspect of Robbins’s book is her implicit invitation for readers like me to become part of the intercultural learning legacies she showcases in her book." -- Peitho "Robbins’ greatest contribution in this book is her ability to move analysis beyond a passive stance, showing how archives can teach and inspire collaboration beyond their initial historical moment through the use of reflection. ... I see this book as a resource for any educator looking to incorporate historical voices into discussions on collaboration and social agency. This is not to say that the book promises any guaranteed solutions, but Robbins offers hopeful ground for cultivating a culture of care and empathy in the classroom. Such a movement towards imaginative social possibility is clearly called for in today’s political moment." -- Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society "Robbins’s idea of the “learning legacy” comes from her decades of public engagement and her research on nineteenth-century women writers’ literacy narratives. A learning legacy, in her conception, is a kind of archive left behind by teachers and students as they work through particular pedagogical problems…. If her idea catches on, it could yield endless local iterations as students and teachers turn to their own local archives to examine how educational praxis and power have been envisioned in the past, and how they might be envisioned for the future." -- Pedagogy