Second Annual Ernest J. Gaines Summer Teaching Institute

Last June, the Ernest J. Gaines Center hosted the First Annual Ernest J. Gaines Summer Teaching Institute. Over the course of a week, teachers from around the area gathered to read and discuss Gaines' works. We also took the time to talk about how they could teach those works, and others, in their own classrooms. The center provided them with access to archival materials and articles that would help in this endeavor.

This summer, the center, in conjunction with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH), will host the Second Annual Ernest J. Gaines Summer Teaching Institute. The institute will be held June 8-June 12, 2015 from 8:00-12:00 each day. The main goal of the institute is to provide area educators with the opportunity to explore, research, and discuss works by Ernest J. Gaines while focusing on how to bring the information garnered from the institute back to their own classrooms. To accomplish this, the institute will involve lectures from Dr. Marcia Gaudet and Dr. Darrell Bourque. Dr. Gaudet served as the founding director of the Ernest J. Gaines Center from 2008-2012, and she has authored, co-authored, and edited numerous books and articles on the work and life of Ernest J. Gaines. Some of her works include "This Louisiana Thing that Drives Me":The Legacy of Ernest J. Gaines (2009). Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays (2006), and Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines: Conversations on the Writer's Craft (1990). Dr. Bourque serves on the Ernest J. Gaines Center's Board of Directors, was the Louisiana Poet Laureate, and received the 2014 Louisiana Writer Award. He has written and presented on Gaines's work as well, including presentations on A Lesson before Dying and Catherine Carmier. Along with these, he has also written about Gaines and Modest Mussorgsky and on heroes in Gaines' fiction.  During the institute, Dr. Matthew Teutsch (Interim Director of the Ernest J. Gaines Center) and Jennifer Morrison (Graduate Assistant in the Ernest J. Gaines Center) will also provide insight and information about Gaines' work and the materials housed within the center.

The institute will involve numerous activities including lectures, discussions, use of archival materials, and most importantly the construction of materials for use in the classroom and in professional activities. The materials constructed by participants will also be available to other educators through the LEH. In conjunction with these items, participants will have the opportunity to visit New Roads, LA one afternoon. The trip will provide participants with the chance to see and to walk the landscape and the area that Gaines writes about in his fiction. These places include the cemetery and the church that play such a prominent role in Gaines' writing. Participants will examine four of Gaines' works: Bloodline, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, and A Lesson before Dying.

The deadline to apply for the Second Annual Ernest J. Gaines Summer Teaching Institute is March 18, 2015. The institute will be limited to 10 participants, and each participant will receive a $200 stipend and a certificate showing their participation for professional development purposes. To apply, go the the Ernest J. Gaines Center's website and complete the application form. Participants will be notified by April 15, 2015 on the status of their status. Applicants must provide the following information:

• name
• school affiliation
• phone number
• email
• a one page letter stating why you would like to participate in the institute, how you plan to incorporate the information learned into your classroom, and your previous experience (if any) with Gaines' work

For more information, contact Dr. Matthew Teutsch at (337)-482-1848 or at gainescenter@louisiana.edu. 

First Annual Ernest J. Gaines Summer Teaching Institute

Last Friday, the first annual Ernest J. Gaines Center Summer Teaching Institute concluded. The institute spanned five days, and participants met from 8:30-11:30 each morning. Teachers from Lafayette Parish and Evangeline Parish participated. During the institute, participants read and discussed four of Gaines texts: "The Sky is Gray," The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, and A Lesson before Dying. Along with the discussion of the texts, the participants were able to view items from the archives and discussed various ways to teach Gaines in the classroom. The pedagogical discussions yielded the best results. Soon, you will be able to access some of the participants' lesson plans through the Ernest J. Gaines Center's website. In conjunction with the center's library guide, these lesson plans will provide teachers with materials to teach Gaines' work, and the works of other authors, in the classroom.

Here is a brief list of some of the pedagogical techniques we discussed:

• Have students construct a Google Map for the places in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
• Have students write and recite a eulogy for one of the characters who passes away 
• Have students edit, for grammar and content, part of Jefferson's diary in A Lesson before Dying
• Have students rewrite a section of a book in a different point of view
• Have students research references in the texts and present on them (i.e. Huey P. Long, Bienville, etc.) 

These are only a few of the items that we mentioned in the institute. Other ideas can be found on the Ernest J. Gaines Center's LibGuide. If you have any thing that you do in the classroom and would like to share it, please leave a comment below or email the center.

One idea that arose out of our prolonged discussions revolved around other texts to incorporate in relation to Gaines and African American literature. Throughout his writing, Gaines talks about the residual effects on slavery on both African Americans and whites. For example, in A Lesson before Dying, when Grant speaks with his former teacher Matthew Antoine, Matthew tells him, "You'll see that it'll take more than five and a half months to wipe away--peel--scrape away the blanket of ignorance that has been plastered and replastered over those [students'] brains in the past three hundred years" (64). Later, when Grant is speaking with Vivian about manhood in chapter twenty one, Grant tells her that all Miss Emma "wants is for him, Jefferson, and me to change everythng that has been going of for three hundred years" (167). These are only two example from one novel. During the institute, we talked about this aspect of Gaines writing and brought in Brother Ali's "The Travelers" from his 2009 album Us. The song tackles the Middle Passage and expounds upon the continuing psychological effects of the "peculiar institution." Brother Ali has mentioned that part of the inspiration for the song came from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. These texts, in relation to Gaines' continued comments about the residual effects of slavery, would be a good way to begin a discussion in class.  

Claire Manes on Teaching Gaines' Work in the Ernest J. Gaines Center

As an adjunct instructor at ULL, I have had the good fortune to teach  Gaines “on site” in the Ernest J. Gaines Center.  Gaines words, works, and photography as well as Karen Bourque’s stained glass portal (shown above) to the center create an ambiance connecting me and my students to Ernest Gaines in a way that no textbook alone can accomplish.  Gaines comes alive in the center that bears his name.

I am a teacher who invites students to find points of contact between their own lives and the literature they read.  Teaching any of Ernest Gaines works offers opportunities for that. While Gaines’ rural Jim Crow south is unfamiliar to most of my students, his characters face universal struggles that readers and non-readers alike can understand.

My introduction to Gaines in the classroom came after a young man in his mid to late twenties related an epiphany he had in middle school while reading  “The Sky Is Gray” for the first time.  The dialog between the minister and the young college student gave my student the necessary freedom to question and challenge authority, too.  It was an “aha moment” that still stirred him some fifteen years later. The young college man tells the preacher: 

"I'm not mad at the world. I'm questioning the world. I'm questioning it with cold logic, sir. What do words like Freedom, Liberty, God, White, Colored mean? I want to know. That's why you are sending us to school, to read and to ask questions. And because we ask these questions, you call us mad. No sir, it is not us who are mad." (97)

This interchange is one of many in the story that offers students the opportunity to reflect on an overarching question in Gaines’ work, “What does it mean to be a man, a person of dignity and integrity?”  My male students resonate with young James’ initiation into manhood; my female students can identify with the challenge of teaching a young boy to be a man and all of us can relate to the “tug of war” between James’ mother, Octavia, and the shop keeper, Helena, at the story’s end.  Both women feel their personal worth and dignity challenged.  The shop keeper wants to give Octavia extra salt meat, but James’ mother refuses charity and demands only the meat she can afford.  At a standoff, James and his mother begin to leave the shop when the Helena calls them back.  James relates, “Me and Mama stop again and look at her.  The old lady takes the meat out of the bag and unwraps it and cuts ‘bout half of it off.  Then she wraps it up again, puts it back in the bag, and gives the bag to Mama.  Mama lays the quarter on the counter saying, “Your kindness will never be forgotten” (117).

This theme of finding and maintaining one’s dignity suffuses Gaines' work.  Jefferson, Mr. Wiggins. and deputy Paul recognize the same struggle  in A Lesson before Dying.  Catherine Carmier written fifty years ago this year is Gaines’ earliest novel. It, too, examines this same issue as Jackson, feeling misplaced in Louisiana and California, wrestles with finding his place in life.  Miss Jane Pittman Gaines’ iconic old lady whose voice takes over the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman walks through a century fraught with hatred and abuse but she walks with her head held high and maintains such integrity and humanity that there are those who have been convinced that she is a real, historical woman.

    

Last page of draft entitled "The Big Gray Sky"

 I try to have my students find points of contact between their own lives and the literature that they read.  Gaines offers that.  Both my students and I gain insight into the universality of our lives when we relate to single mothers raising sons to maturity, men and women maintaining dignity despite enduring brutal and demeaning treatment. This universality can be seen in Catherine Carmier as well when Jackson thinks about all of the people he met while in California and how their positions were similar to his. He met a Native American from New Mexico, an Asian from Hong Kong, and a white boy from Dayton, Ohio.   

Claire Manes, Ph.D, ( UL Lafayette 2007)  has taught at the elementary, high school, technical college, and university level.  Ernest Gaines’ work has been of importance in her teaching and  personal life.

Gaines, Ernest. “The Sky is Gray.” Bloodline. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976. 83-117. Print.