Teaching Welty in the High School Classroom: A Student/Teacher Collaboration

Abstract

Teaching Welty in the High School Classroom:A Student/Teacher Collaboration Rebecca L. Harrison, Paisley Sloan Burklow, Morgan Murphy, Susie Chestnut Sewell, Abbie Smith, and Arielle Vaughan Introduction Over two decades ago, former Carnegie president Ernest Boyer put out a call to those of us in the academy. His challenge was to connect "the rich resources of the university to our most pressing social, civic, and ethical problems, to our children, to our schools, to our teachers, and to our cities," where our work can move beyond being viewed as that of "isolated islands" and, instead, become true "staging grounds for action" (27). His conviction that the scholarship of engagement was one necessary pathway forward for this difficult task continues to resonate in the twenty-first century, in which the stakes for our K-12 partners have been raised, and the very resources they need to enact meaningful change continue to be drained.1 While many in the Eudora Welty community have donated their time to fostering connections with secondary schools, there is much left to be done. As we work to explode the historically restrictive and dismissive categorization of this literary giant, we must incite civic progress by lifting up the teachers responsible for raising the next generation of students and who have the potential to fracture the marginalization of Welty and her groundbreaking, modernist vision in high school curricula. Over the course of my many years at the University of West Georgia, a robust regional school located in Carrollton, I have increasingly become invested in this mission with our English education students, who not only become teachers in our feeder communities but who, more often than not, return to our MA program for additional content expertise.2 In this capacity, I began to embrace Boyer's call, conducting public school classroom observations, studying textbook toolkits, and developing pedagogical units on Welty applicable to these environs, the state standards, and the challenges of twenty-first century multimedia literacies. In doing so, I have merely embraced what Welty has sought to teach all of us through her [End Page 157] writing. I have listened, learned to see, and opened a space in my collegiatelevel classrooms to help those who teach public school find a voice of change applicable to and purposeful for the worlds they inhabit daily—worlds that exist beyond the privileged spaces I manage in the academy. This work with Welty over the years serves as one small contribution toward the effort to increase her presence in our local school systems. Cheering on teachers as they strive to possess the fierce independence required to ignite change through Welty's world, and in spaces restricted by both government regulations and financial exigencies, is particularly fitting work. After all, Chestina Welty was a schoolteacher herself, and such courage to forge a new path is precisely the "chief inheritance" Welty takes from her mother, a shared trait that "made the strongest bond between [them] and the strongest tension" (OWB 904). It is in that space—of both legacy and mothering—that I continue to reflect deeply on what I inherited from my own mentors and what I seek to leave to those brave souls who do such challenging work with this figure in public high schools. When I recently was tasked with piloting a graduate class on approaches to teaching American literature for a new concentration in pedagogy in our MA program, I (re)embraced the effort to break down the silos often built up around the two major sets of students in our classrooms—secondary educators and traditional literature students studying to be collegiate faculty—via inquiry-based pedagogies and multimodality implemented through a rigorous, culminating unit on Welty.3 Structuring this course was certainly a challenging task given the diverse needs of the audience, but Welty, and her magnificent, complex artistry spotlighted in Delta Wedding, brought us together as a unified group of scholarly teachers committed to the advancement of her work and to our sincere mutual desire to build bridges between collegiate and secondary teaching environs. These students went far beyond the parameters of the traditional Socratic seminar to experience Delta Wedding, embracing Welty's world through...