Reflections of the Second Annual Ernest J. Gaines Summer Teaching Institute

Last week, the Ernest J. Gaines Center, in conjunction with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH), hosted the Second Annual Ernest J. Gaines Summer Teaching Institute. In June 2014, the center hosted the inaugural institute with four participants from area schools. This year, the institute included nine participants from area schools and universities. One participant even came from Texas to take part. Participants read four of Gaines's works during the week: Bloodline, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, and A Lesson before Dying. Each day, participants heard from the center's staff and two Gaines scholars who are also Gaines scholars: Marcia Gaudet and Darrell Bourque. Participants also had the opportunity, each day, to look at items from the collection and to work on lesson plans that would incorporate their discussion and items from the collection into their lesson plans. These lesson plans will be available on the LEH's website soon. Midway through the institute, on Wednesday, the participants had the opportunity to head out to Oscar and New Roads, LA. There, they sat with Gaines in his house, explored the cemetery and the church, and had the opportunity to eat with Gaines at local restaurant.

Overall, the institute provided lively discussion not just on Gaines's works but also on how to incorporate those works, and the themes he discusses, into the middle and high school classroom as well the university classroom. These discussions arose when the group thought about the importance of Gaines's work in relation to the recent incidents involving African American men and women in the news today. During the discussions, one of the questions that came up felt extremely important. A participant, who taught Gaines in her classroom last year, mentioned that her class was predominately African American. While teaching Gaines, white students in her class asked her why they were reading about the African American experience and used the term "reverse racism" to express how they felt. This anecdote reminded me of my own experiences teaching African American literature in the university classroom. Once, when teaching Langston Hughes, I had a student approach me after class to inquire, and to complain, about why we were reading so much African American literature. Truth be told, Hughes and others were a small part of the class.

What my encounter with that student and the participant's story showed me was that when people come face-to-face with the realities of their situation and place within society they either recognize it and work to make society better from their position or they completely reject the idea that they come from a position of driveler and claim that everyone has a chance at the American Dream. When talking about how to help students who reject the image they see in the mirror, we thought about approaching a text like Gaines through another angle. Gaines recognizes that while the African American experience is unique there are others in the world who have suffered for various reasons as well based on ethnicity or class. He writes about this in "A Very Big Order: Reconstructing Identity" and in Catherine Carmier. With that in mind, a teacher could have students think about Gaines's influences and how they affected his own writing. Russian, Irish, and American writers influenced Gaines. Turgenev, Tolstoy, Joyce, Steinbeck, Cather, and others wrote about the lower classes, and the peasants in their societies. When Gaines read those works, he saw similarities between the people he knew and the ones the other authors wrote about. What he did not see, though, was his own people, the African American community he grew up in rural Louisiana.

Another way to possibly approach Gaines's work, or other African American texts, with students who want to push back because they claim we reside within a post-racial society is to incorporate music. Historically, people viewed punk music as an "other," a subculture of outsiders. Having students enter into Gaines's work through a music that others ostracized and that created a community for its listeners is a way to think about how to help students understand the universality to Gaines's works. Bands like The Descendents, NOFX, Rancid, Reagan Youth, Misfits, Black Flag, Minor Threat, etc. would be good places to look. There are other ways to address students' reluctance to reading authors like Gaines, but these are just a couple we thought of.

Many other discussions took place during the week, but the one above is what really stuck out to me because it is something that I have thought about, especially when teaching Gaines in the region that he writes about. Doing that creates a whole new group of reactions to Gaines and his work. What are your thoughts on getting reluctant students, who feel you are representing one group too much, to understand that we need to read African American, Asian, Chicano, and other literature? How do you respond? I would like to know because this is something I think we all deal with at one point or another in the classroom, or in community talks, and it is something that needs to be addressed.