Linking the Secondary Schools and the University: American Studies as a Collaborative Public Enterprise

Abstract

Linking the Secondary Schools and the University: American Studies as a Collaborative Public Enterprise Sarah Robbins, Janet Edwards, Gerri Hajduk, June Howard, David Winter, Dede Yow, and Sandra Zagarell* This forum extends a session originally held at the American Studies Association (ASA) convention in Washington, D.C., when most of those listed above participated in a celebratory yet critical conversation about a 1995–1996 project—“Domesticating the Secondary Canon”—funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The call for proposals for the 1997 convening of the association, inviting the ASA membership’s consideration “of what we mean and how we are shaped by public spaces, public institutions, and public life,” seemed to invite us to revisit that collaboration. The project developed at the intersection of multiple public spaces—a federal agency, a state university, local secondary schools—and the impulse at the heart of the “Domesticating the Secondary Canon” enterprise was (and still is) to enhance reform of public education. 1 We also take both the 1997 convention call and the acceptance of our panel proposal as representative of ASA’s growing interest in such university-school projects. We can offer an encouraging story of sustained collaboration and describe the benefits for its original participants and others. At the same time, however, our experience highlights constraints facing those who would like to undertake similar programs. Furthermore, we will try to [End Page 783] highlight some useful avenues for interdisciplinary study of such interactions and their potential for shaping the culture of American public education. Stylistically, this forum begins as a chorus, a “we” voice drafted by project co-director Sarah Robbins and reviewed by all of us; then it weaves in shorter “solos” from several of the program participants. 2 Presenting this forum as a blend of whole-group and personal comments, we hope to represent how our work for this project continues to support collaborative and individual efforts for school improvement. Re-viewing the Project’s Goals within a Context of Public Institutional Culture With its four-week summer institute’s content emphasis on nineteenth-century American women’s writing, “Domesticating the Secondary Canon” was, on one level, a fairly traditional enactment of the summer institute model that NEH funds. 3 As such, the project situated itself within the framework of what program officer Janet Edwards identified for us as the Endowment’s “threefold mission: to support the creation of new knowledge in the humanities, to offer professional development opportunities to teachers, and to foster public understanding of the humanities” (ASA panel). The project’s official description proposed that “twenty-five secondary teachers [of American history and literature] in northwest Georgia” work within an interdisciplinary scholarly tradition by focusing on texts “written for, by, and about nineteenth-century women.” To reviewers of the grant proposal (as to readers of American Quarterly), this opening sentence for the abstract would not have seemed new, as this is a body of material and an approach for study familiar to university culture since the 1970s, certainly. But as residents of “northwest Georgia” and active participants in local school culture, would-be co-directors Yow and Robbins were well aware that women’s literature and history had not yet made much of a mark in area school curricula. 4 Hence, the title “Domesticating the Secondary Canon” held a particular resonance for the two of them and, eventually, for the teacher participants. On the one hand, domesticating referred to a tradition of domestic literature, so that “domesticating the canon” announced a wish to incorporate women’s texts into school courses of study.At the same time, domesticating also meant that the seminar would encourage a long-term redistribution of authority by empowering [End Page 784] teachers to shape the curriculum of their own classrooms and beyond. In this sense, the “Domesticating” of the proposal title drew on gendered theories of education culture in the United States, by alluding to what Madeline Grumet has identified as the need to un-do typically unequal authority relationships in schooling, wherein (mainly male) administrators and public officials dominate (female/feminized) classroom teachers, whose instructional leadership potential is thus constrained and contained. 5 Along similar lines, the “Secondary” term...