Class and the College Classroom: Essays on Teaching

We have long been encouraged to look to education, especially higher education, for the solution to social problems, particularly as a way out of poverty for the talented and the hard working. But in its appointed role as the path to upward mobility that makes inequality more acceptable, higher education is faltering these days. As funds for public institutions are cut and tuition costs soar everywhere; as for-profit education races into the breach; and as student debt grows wildly; the comfortable future once promised to those willing to study hard has begun to fade from sight. So now is a good time to take a more serious look at the ways class structures higher education and the ways teachers can bring it into focus in the classroom. In recent decades, scholarly work and pedagogical practice in higher education have paid increasing attention to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.But among these four terms of analysis -- and clearly they are interrelated -- class is often an afterthought, and work that does examine class and higher education tends to focus only on admissions, on who is in the college classroom, not on what happens there. Class and the College Classroom offers a broader look at the connections between college teaching and social class.It collects and reprints twenty essays originally published in Radical Teacher, a journal that has been a leader in the field of critical pedagogy since 1975. This wide-ranging and insightful volume addresses the interests, concerns, and pedagogical needs of teachers committed to social justice and provides them with new tools for thinking and teaching about class.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction I. What Is Class? Is Class an Identity? by Richard Ohmann II. Who Gets To Be in the Classroom A Dream Deferred: Undocumented Students at CUNY by Carolina Bank Muñoz Last In and First Out: Poor Students in Academe in Times of Fiscal Crisis by Vivyan Adair Welfare "Reform" and One Community College by Susan Jhirad Teaching Freire and CUNY Open Admissions by Kristen Gallagher III. Class and the Working Teacher A Teaching Temp Talks Back by Michelle LaPlace Instruction by Kat Meads Contingent Teaching, Corporate Universities, and the Academic Labor Movement by Joseph Entin Anti-Intellectualism, Homophobia, and the Working-Class Gay/Lesbian Academic by Carlos L. Dews and Carolyn Leste Law IV. Students' Class and Classroom Dynamics Stories Out of School: Poor and Working-Class Students at a Small Liberal Arts College by Laurie Nisonoff, Susan J. Tracy, and Stanley Warner Class Privilege, Oppression, and the World in the Classroom by Erin Smith Enforcing the Rules by Taylor Stoehr Upward Mobility and Higher Education: Mining the Contradictions in a Worker Education Program by Emily Schnee V. Teaching About Class in the Humanities Working-Class Cultural Studies in the University by Lawrence Hanley All That Hollywood Allows: Film and the Working Class by Linda Dittmar Canon Contexts and Class Contexts: Teaching American Literature from a Market Perspective by Janet Galligani Casey Teaching Howards End to the Basts: Class Markers in the Classroom and in the Bourgeois Novel by Ed Wiltse VI. Teaching About Class Across the Campus Empathy Education: Teaching About Women and Poverty in the Introductory Women's Studies Classroom by Jennifer Scanlon Teaching an Interdisciplinary Course on the American Upper Class by Richie Zweigenhaft Teaching About Class in the Library by Emily Drabinski PostScript Contributors Index

About the Author :
Robert C. Rosen is Professor of English at William Paterson University, US. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Radical Teacher.

Review :
This book offers many teaching strategies, framed by the awareness that a classroom encounter with otherness often 'substitutes' for the real thing (147), 'sanctioning,' as Ohmann writes, 'all kinds of nonthreatening nonconformity' (147) … This volume is valuable for its unflinching look at the current academy and for its warning that higher education, even as it works to be inclusive, can reproduce 'class structures and relations' (146) appropriating 'lower' class artifacts and making students comfort class only within safe boundaries, changing nothing by the items on our syllabi.