Introduction: Teaching American History in Alternative Spaces

Since its inception in 1992, this journal's “Teaching and Textbook” sections have focused almost exclusively on college and university teaching and, with a few exceptions, have been located literally or imaginatively on a college campus. With such profound recent changes in the discipline, and especially the increasingly broad public connection that so many historians have forged in so many ways, we believe it is time to rethink the section's methodological and intellectual boundary.

This issue's section contains several essays that explore sophisticated teaching for college students and adult learners in what we cautiously call “alternative spaces.” These areas are broadly imagined here, well beyond the campus-located college classroom. Such spaces most often figure only in unspoken and invisible ways on our landscape of professional instruction. The five-hundred-person lecture introductory course, the medium-sized two-hundred-level advanced introduction to a national or thematic history, or the tiny graduate seminar—and the students who inhabit them—have most fundamentally shaped how we understand our teaching responsibilities.

Yet our role in teaching history outside the traditional classroom has long served important public ends and personal aims. Changes in the profession, and especially demands stemming from recent civic challenges and mass incarceration, have moved instructors to embrace professional teaching practices that include commitments to public history, community engagement, place-based methods, and experiential learning. Featured in this forum are attempts to understand the scope and possibilities of teaching history in a few examples of alternative spaces: the prison, the church, and even, in some ways, an entire country—a country, though, that is not the United States.¹

The explorations here are, at times, deeply disturbing and powerfully inspiring. They provide moving portraits of constraint as well as possibility. They speak of empowerment and agency during incarceration, hopeful steps toward racial solidarity beginning with historical lessons about Black history in an overwhelmingly white-dominated public space, and the liberation of moving the body—in a supposedly strange place and in often uncomfortable ways—as a way to learn experientially about the fluidity of history, culture, race, and nation.

The centerpiece of the forum is an interchange organized by Stevie Wilson titled “Abolition and Liberation: An Interchange on Teaching behind the Walls.” Currently incarcerated, Wilson has become an influential activist and intellectual on matters relating to prison education. He has brought together historians and teachers from behind and outside prison walls to discuss the politics and distinctive pedagogy of prison teaching. Along with Wilson, Daniel Berger, Catherine L. Besteman, Michelle Daniel Jones, Leo Hylton, and Elizabeth Nelson explore a wide range of issues, from all-encompassing bureaucratic constraints to moments and spaces of liberation. Central to the discussion are the many ways the contributors' commitment to justice generally, and abolition specifically, shape their teaching. Activism necessarily fuels their teaching, helping move it from the potential for destructive “white saviorism” to a genuinely transformative tool. All this happens within a set of carceral institutions generally designed to suppress the humanity of those behind their walls. Prisons set up all kinds of obstacles to teaching and learning, and prison education frequently reproduces inequalities (especially but by no means exclusively racial). Yet as the many vivid examples in the interchange indicate, such education provides an expansive set of lessons for those who teach not just inside but also outside those walls, whether that be powerfully challenging modes of critical interpretation, or the breadth of sources that best provoke discussion in a classroom, or how to rethink the micropolitics of how teachers set up their pedagogical spaces. We are grateful to these contributors, for, as Wilson remarks, “the walls and fences are designed to render impossible an event such as this.”

Molly Reed, in her essay, “Bringing the Archive Inside: Primary Sources in the Prison Classroom,” provides a remarkable complement to the interchange. Reed discusses her experience with the Cornell Prison Education Program, where she has served as a teacher and organizer since 2015. Among many other issues, she explores the corporeality of prison teaching, embodied for her in her privilege as a “nonthreatening white woman.” What is appropriate attire? How physically close can, and should, she come to prisoners? Reed exposes such challenges, and the conclusion of her essay provides detailed guidance and invaluable suggestions for those on the outside who might wish to teach behind the walls. The central part of her essay, however, revolves around one of her foundational pedagogical moves. In a location where access to the Internet is close to zero, and other resources are extremely difficult to bring to the classroom, Reed reveals how it is still possible to have students embrace the joy—and many difficulties—of wrestling with primary sources. In the process of her course on archival methods, her students learn about foundational theories of “the archive,” as well as how to create their own. Reed is a realist, but she ultimately points toward the learning process that she and her incarcerated students co-facilitate as inspiring “a new appreciation for the archive as a space of possibility.”

In “A Location of Possibility: Teaching Black History to White Folks at a Black-Led Church,” the authors Christy Clark-Pujara, Karen Reece, Alexander Gee Jr., and Stephen Kantrowitz describe a community-based course designed to make Black history accessible to white community members in Madison, Wisconsin. Reaching nearly four thousand participants since its inception in 2016, the course foregrounds the Black experience in American history and does so in a Black church in a predominantly Black part of Madison, where few white students have spent much time. The setting; the curriculum that equally honors community and academic knowledge; and the efforts of course leaders who are drawn from faculty in the African American studies and history departments at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, leaders in the small nonprofit community organization Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development, and community facilitators all offer knowledge and experiences not included in school curricula and the daily lives of the white participants. The course draws predominantly white residents seeking to work for racial justice, and their experiences, as well as those of the instructors, illustrate the complex importance of setting and space as a usefully provocative component of learning about Black history.

In his article, “Teaching America in Cuba,” Joseph J. González describes a pairing of courses that takes us well beyond the simple frameworks of travel and tourism experiences that constitute many study-abroad programs. González invites us to consider how embodied learning, which includes dance and movement, negotiating extramarket exchanges, and acquiring and preparing necessities such as food and drink—teach in a way that reading texts or traveling on prepackaged tours cannot. As he and his students move throughout Cuba, they discover commonalities and differences about complex cultural constructions of race, the impact of U.S. policies and the reciprocal impacts of geopolitics across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the expansive meaning of nation and culture on identities and histories.

Most of all, these essays provide remarkable insights into how we might envision teaching U.S. history—as an activity that in so many parts of our lives we are always doing, saturating the world in a wide array of places in ways both formal and informal. Liberated from the traditionally imagined college classroom, we can see how the U.S. history lessons offered in these alternative spaces encourage learning about culture, power, bureaucracy, race, and nation in ways not accessible solely through traditional texts or in classrooms. Offering this section demands that we “come to this work,” as Molly Reed puts it, “without fear but with open eyes” about the ethical and moral complexities this teaching may involve. Listening, reading, discussion and dialogue, writing—even simple and ordinary efforts to eat and move—take on new meanings outside the deeply engrained behavioral expectations and cultural roles embedded in campus spaces and classrooms. As we gain insights from our colleagues and comrades who are doing some or all of their teaching outside the traditional classroom, we can all learn new methods and practices that will productively inform our teaching practices, in increasingly numerous—and we hope robustly pluralistic—kinds of places.

Footnotes