Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

Why Literature of Resistance? Or, Who's Afraid of Pol Pot? Next spring, I'll be teaching a course I'm calling "Literature of Resistance" I'll be collaborating in a literature criticism course where we'll examine fiction and non-fiction examples of resistance -- critiquing the social/cultural kairos in which the work was framed, the author's intentions (if available), the literary/rhetorical moves made, the audience's reception, and any short-term or long-term effects of the literature. Currently, the authors' list includes Acosta, Frankl, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Thoreau, James Baldwin, Frederick Douglas, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jefferson, King, Atwood, Mandela, Chavez, Chief Joseph, and Malcolm X. Those are on the tentative syllabus, though I intend to introduce each of these in the first week and have students choose which authors they are most interested in, then prioritize our syllabus based on those conversations. Further, I'll ...

"School Board" sounds quaint, but the Aldine Independent School District can't be described as quaint. It's about 110 square miles of variously developed and undeveloped suburbia north of Houston. Aldine -- Largely Latino, 2012 In my second semester course, students choose a local "concern" -- local being limited to sub-county level administration -- and perform various rhetorical analyses on their peer stakeholders (similar community members; not the government entities), the "state" (gov), and texts the "state" produces to address the concern. Plenty of reading genres they've never seen, talking to neighbors they've never spoken to, understanding local political structures they've never heard of. Ironically, Texas insists on multiple exposures to state government and history through secondary and higher education, but apparently little education is provided to actually empower citizens in their local ecology -- where t...