ABOUT THIS BOOK

Teaching with Tension is a collection of seventeen original essays that address the extent to which attitudes about race, impacted by the current political moment in the United States, have produced pedagogical challenges for professors in the humanities. As a flashpoint, this current political moment is defined by the visibility of the country's first black president, the election of his successor, whose presidency has been associated with an increased visibility of the alt-right, and the emergence of the neoliberal university. Together these social currents shape the tensions with which we teach.

Drawing together personal reflection, pedagogical strategies, and critical theory, Teaching with Tension offers concrete examinations that will foster student learning. The essays are organized into three thematic sections: "Teaching in Times and Places of Struggle" examines the dynamics of teaching race during the current moment, marked by neoconservative politics and twenty-first century freedom struggles. "Teaching in the Neoliberal University" focuses on how pressures and exigencies of neoliberalism (such as individualism, customer-service models of education, and online courses) impact the way in which race is taught and conceptualized in college classes. The final section, "Teaching How to Read Race and (Counter)Narratives," homes in on direct strategies used to historicize race in classrooms comprised of millennials who grapple with race neutral ideologies. Taken together, these sections and their constitutive essays offer rich and fruitful insight into the complex dynamics of contemporary race and ethnic studies education.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

PHILATHIA BOLTON is an assistant professor of English at the University of Akron.

CASSANDER L. SMITH is an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama and the author of Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World.

LEE BEBOUT is an associate professor of English at Arizona State University and the author of Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies and Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and White.

REVIEWS

"Teaching with Tension should be required reading for all university professors. Writing from diverse perspectives and positions, these teachers and scholars analyze the promises and the perils of teaching race as an academic subject to varied sets of students in our current movement. Whether you are a beginning graduate assistant or a seasoned veteran professor, you will find something to improve your pedagogy around issues of race and racism." —Katy Chiles, author of Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literatures of Early America

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Acknowledgements
Introduction--Teaching with Tension: Race and Education at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century
Philathia Bolton, Cassander L. Smith, and Lee Bebout

Section I: Teaching in Times and Places of Struggle
Chapter 1--What Everyone Knows: Teaching Ferguson in Saint Louis
Corinne Wohlford

Chapter 2--Resisting the Single Story in an Arizona Classroom
Anita Huizar-Hernández

Chapter 3--Resisting Impulses and the Challenges of Teaching Race in the Early American ‘Ethnic’ Studies Classroom
Cassander L. Smith

Chapter 4--Walls and Bridges: Teaching Culture and Diversity to Pre-Service Teachers
Stuart Rhoden

Chapter 5-- Multi-Faceted Strands of Resistance: Teaching African American Literature in a Maximum Security Facility
Briana Whiteside

Chapter 6--Relief and Resistance: Student Emotions in a Majority-Minority Ethnic Studies Classroom
Magdalena Barrera

Section II: Teaching in the Neoliberal University
Chapter 7--The Hoop of Learning: Inclusion, Collaboration, and Education for Indigenous American Youth
Travis Franks and Kyle Mitchell

Chapter 8--How We Lost Our Academic Freedom: Difference and the Teaching of Ethnic and Gender Studies
John Streamas

Chapter 9--Onward into the Discomfort: Teaching for Racial Justice in an Era of Media Outrage, the Alt-Right, and the Neoliberal University
Lee Bebout

Chapter 10--Virtually White: Teaching Race in Online Classes
Dan Colson

Chapter 11--Toward a Pedagogy of Presence or How I Nearly Lost My Body to the Neo-Liberal Academy
Drew Lopenzina

Chapter 12--Teaching Whiteness in the Neoliberal University: Positionality, Privilege, Resistance, and Transformation
Marguerite Wilson

Section III: Teaching How to Read Race and (Counter)Narratives
Chapter 13-- Frangible Whiteness: Teaching Race in the Context of White Fragility
Marcia Nichols and Jennifer Wacek

Chapter 14--Some of my Students are Leprechauns (Or Why it is Difficult for White College Students to Understand that Racism is still a Big Deal)
Carmen Lugo-Lugo

Chapter 15--Exploring Development of Immigrant Fiction: Pedagogy of Counternarratives
Umme Al-wazedi

Chapter 16-- The Potential of a Moment: Race Literacy and Black American Literature
Philathia Bolton

Chapter 17 --Teaching Asian American Literature in the Urban Multicultural Classroom:
Reflexive Practice, Cultural Politics, and the Problem of Identity within a Transnational Framework
Jungah Kim

Conclusion--Back to the Classroom: A Final Note
Philathia Bolton, Cassander L. Smith, and Lee Bebout

Contributing Authors
Index

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