Synopses & Reviews
...I ... celebrat[e] a curriculum at every level of education that acknowledges the existential realities of its teachers and students. These teachers make themselves present so that their students may be present as well, and in that presence integrate their anxious, sweaty, sublime ideas and feelings with the stuff of texts and theories. --from the Afterword by Madeleine R. Grumet
Synopsis
A rich and honest conversation about professors' lives and the absurdity of trying to separate the personal from the professional.
Synopsis
Diane P. Freedman is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire and the author or editor of several books, including most recently Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal. Martha Stoddard Holmes is Assistant Professor of Literature and Writing Studies at California State University at San Marcos and the author of Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture.
Synopsis
These highly personal essays from a range of academic settings explore the palpable moments of discomfort, disempowerment, and/or enlightenment that emerge when we discard the fiction that the teacher has no body. Visible and/or invisible, the body can transform both the teacher's experience and classroom dynamics. When students think the teacher's body is clearly marked by ethnicity, race, disability, size, gender, sexuality, illness, age, pregnancy, class, linguistic and geographic origins, or some combination of these, both the mode and the content of education can change. Other, less visible aspects of a teacher's body, such as depression or a history of sexual assault, can have an equally powerful impact on how we teach and learn. The collection anatomizes these moments of embodied pedagogy as unexpected teaching opportunities and examines their apparent impact on teacher-student educational dynamics of power, authority, desire, friendship, open-mindedness, and resistance.
Table of Contents
Foreword,Bodies enter the classroom /Rosemarie Garland-Thomson --Teacher's body /Betty Smith Franklin --On the desk : dwarfism, teaching, and the body /Scott Andrew Smith --Body teaching /Cortney Davis --Teaching women's studies, e-mailing cancer /Carolyn DiPalma --Johnny Mnemonic meets the bimbo : feminist pedagogy and postmodern performance /Diane Price Herndl --"I've got a blind prof" : the place of blindness in the academy /Rod Michalko --My body, myself : a quadriplegic's perception of and approach to teaching /Richard Radtke with James Skouge --Day the foreign devil came to class : my teaching body in China /Pam Whitfield --Walking on thin ice : the il/legitimacy of race and racial issues in the classroom /Simone A. James Alexander --Moving bodies /Petra Kuppers --Dancing revolution : a meditation on teaching and aging /Brenda Daly --Enforcing diversity and living with disability : learning from my first teaching year /Ray Pence --"Sisterly camaraderie" and other queer friendships : a gay teacher interacting with straight students /Jonathan Alexander.