?What if American Studies is defined not so much in the pages of the most cutting-edge publications, but through what happens in our classrooms and other learning spaces?? In Teaching American Studies Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello, Joseph Entin, and Rebecca Hill ask a diverse group of American Studies educators to respond to that question by writing chapters about teaching that use a classroom activity or a particular course to reflect on the state of the field of American Studies.

Teaching American Studies speaks to teachers with a wide range of relationships to the field. To start, it is a useful how-to guide for faculty who might be new to, or unfamiliar with, American Studies. Each author brings the reader into their classes to offer specific, concrete details about their pedagogical practice, and their students' learning. The resulting chapters connect theory and educational action as well as share challenges, difficulties, and lessons learned. The volume also provides a collective impression of American Studies from the point of view of students and teachers. What primary and secondary texts and what theoretical challenges and issues do faculty use to organize their teaching? How does the teaching we do respond to our institutional and educational contexts? How do our experiences and those of our students challenge or change our understanding of American Studies? Chapters in this collection discuss teaching a broad range of materials, from memoirs and novels by Anne Moody and Octavia Butler to cutting-edge cultural theory, to the widely used collection Keywords for American Cultural Studies.

But the chapters in this collection are also about dancing, eating, and walking around a campus to view statues and gravestones. They are about teaching during the era of Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter, and giving up authority in the classroom.

Teaching American Studies is both a new way to think about American Studies and a timely collection of effective ways to teach about race, gender, sexuality, and power in a moment of political polarization and intense public scrutiny of universities.

Table of Contents

Foreword, Roderick A. Ferguson

Acknowledgments

Introduction: How Pedagogical Practice Defines American Studies, Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello, Joseph Entin, and Rebecca Hill

Part I. Behond the Syllabus: Planning and Transforming Whole Courses

1. Course Objectives

On Resisting Solutions to the ?Race Problem? in the Southern STEM Classroom, Nihad M. Farooq

2. Teaching an Introductory Master's Degree Course, Paul Lauter

3. Teaching the Medical Other

Thinking beyond Assumptions through the History of Midwifery, Paul J. Croce

4. Always the Good Guys

Latinx Studies and the Myth of American Exceptionalism, Guillermo Avila-Saavedra

Part II. Unpacking the Familiar, Introducing the New: Teaching Key Texts and Terms

5. When an Old Assignment Becomes New Again

Teaching Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter, Catherine McNicol Stock

6. Coalition Time in the American Studies Classroom, Richard T. Rodríguez

7. Teaching American Studies One Word at a Time, Linda Stewart

8. Our ?Positive Obsession?

Teaching Interdisciplinary American Studies through Octavia Butler's Lfe and Work, Sarah Hentges

Part III. Individual Assignments: Challenges, Adjustments, and Innovations

9. Teaching Theory in American Studies

Efforts at Unsettling Home in Three Assignments, Rebecca Hill

10. Reppin' American Studies

Asian Pacific Islander American Studies and Popular Culture as Pedagogy, Stanley Thangaraj

11. ?Mister, How Come We Never Learned This??

Teaching American Studies in a High School Setting, Dave DePietro

Let This Seminar Be a Starting Point

Digital Storytelling and the African American Experience, Kabria Baumgartner

Part IV. Movements and/in the Classroom: Affect, Students, and Shifting Boundaries in American Studies

13. ?Gonna Stomp Some Rump?

Embodied Learning and the Politics of Pleasure, Wendy Kozol

14. Don't Look Award

The Bodies of American Studies, Adriana Estill

15. Making American Studies Great Again?

Teaching the Nation under Trumpism, Megan Bayles and Julie Sze

16. #BlackLivesMatter and Feminist Pedagogy

Teaching a Movement Unfolding, Aimee Bahng and Reena Goldthree

Part V. American Studies Outside: Rethinking the Classroom and Sites of Learning

17. Obama Loves Sweet Potato Pie

American Studies at a Food Service Training Academy, Doris Friedensohn

18. Ruined for Life

Cocreation, Service-Learning, and Taking American Studies Scholarship Seriously in an American Studies Intro Course, Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello, Krisin Anderson, Jake Lefker, and Rosario Ubiera-Minaya

19. Monumental Protest; or, Remaking Places through AR, Ingrid Gessner

20. ?The Walk of Memory?

An Excursion into Race, Place, and History in the (Southern) American Studies Classroom, Kendra Hamilton

Afterword, Kandice Chuh

List of Contributors

Index