Full Description

Social class continues to be a powerful yet invisible regulator inside American colleges and universities. While the impact of college students' own backgrounds is well-studied, too little attention has been given to the social class histories of those who teach—and even less to the ways teachers' histories affect their relationships with students, who themselves are from a variety of class cultures. This important new book offers that insight.

Coming to Class presents twenty-one original essays on the relationship of pedagogical practice to instructors' social class histories. The contributors, teachers of composition as well as literature, represent every area of English studies—one of the most politically contentious sites in contemporary debates about higher education. They write about the influence of class on their teaching from a diverse set of theoretical positions, subject positions, and socioeconomic realities. One of the greatest strengths of the collection is the fact that most of the contributors are just coming to recognize the role of social class in their own pedagogical practices—in the same ways other teachers are in their classrooms. Together, their voices will further the many conversations that are vigorously underway.

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Contents

Contents:
1. Class and Classroom, J. Daniels
2. Digging Deep, L. DeSalvo
3. 100 Friends and Other Class Issues: Teaching Both In and Out of the Game, J. Ernest
4. Truth and the Working Classroom, C. Faulkner
5. Production Values and Composition Instruction: Keeping the Hearth, Keeping the Faith, K. Fitts & A. France
6. Stupid Clown and the Spirit's Motive: Class Bias in Literary and Composition Studies, O. Frey
7. Class Conflict in the English Profession, D. Lazere
8. A Pedagogy of Respect: Teaching as an Ally of Working-Class Students, L. Mackenzie
9. Academic Life as Middle Ground: A Conversation, C. McDonald & R. McDonald
10. Seeing Different: A Reflection on Narrative, Abstraction, and Talk About Social Class, J. McMillan
11. Color and Class, C. Milanés
12. Intersections of Race and Class in the Academy, B. Moss
13. Notes from Another Underground: Working-Class Agency and the Educational Process, K. Railey
14. Living on the Border: Ethotic Conflict and the Satiric Impulse, C. Reeves
15. Rising and Converging: Race and Class in the South, H. Roskelly
16. Around the Edges of "The Renaissance": Queer Consciousness and Class Dysphoria, A. Shepard
17. Passing: A Family Dissemblance, P. Sullivan
18. Halfway Back Home, G. Tate
19. An Introduction to Social Scientific Discussion on Class, V. Villanueva
20. Class and Comfort: The Slums and the Greens, E. White
21. The Job, the Job: The Risk of Work and Uses of Text, J. Zandy