Because of its broad membership, regional breadth, early creation and size, SREB President Stephen L. Pruitt said the commission is poised to produce critical recommendations that will inform not only Southern education decision makers but those throughout the nation.
“AI is fundamentally changing the classroom and workplace,” Pruitt said. “With that in mind, this commission is working to ensure they make recommendations that are strategic, practical and thoughtful.”
The commission is set to meet for another year and plans to release a second set of recommendations soon. Here are the first six:
Policy recommendation #1: Establish state AI networks States should establish statewide artificial intelligence networks so people, groups and agencies can connect, communicate, collaborate and coordinate AI efforts across each state. These statewide networks could eventually form a regional group of statewide AI network representatives who could gather regularly to share challenges and successes.
Policy recommendation #2: Develop targeted AI guidance States should develop and maintain targeted guidance for distinct groups using, integrating or supporting the use of AI in education. States should include, for example, elementary students, middle school students, high school students, postsecondary students, teachers, administrators, postsecondary faculty and administrators and parents.
Policy recommendation #3: Provide high-quality professional development State K-12 and postsecondary agencies should provide leadership by working with local districts and institutions to develop plans to provide and incentivize high-quality professional development for AI. The plans should aim to enhance student learning.
Policy recommendation #5: Assess local capacity and needs States should develop and conduct AI needs assessments across their states to determine the capacity of local districts, schools and postsecondary institutions to integrate AI successfully. These should be designed to help states determine which institution, district or school needs state support, what type of support and at what level.
Policy recommendation #6: Develop resource allocation plans States should develop detailed resource allocation plans for AI implementation in schools, school districts and institutions of postsecondary education to ensure that the implementation of AI is successful and sustainable. These plans should inform state fiscal notes related to education and AI.
The 60-plus member commission was established in February of 2024. Members include policymakers and education and business leaders throughout the 16-state SREB region.
For more information about the commission please see the following links:
SREB Staff
A nonprofit, nonpartisan interstate compact, SREB was created in 1948 by Southern governors and legislators who recognized the link between education and economic vitality. SREB states are Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. More at SREB.org.
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Imagine a classroom in which young students are excitedly discussing their future aspirations and a career in medicine feels like a tangible goal rather than a distant dream. Now, imagine that most of the students come from historically marginalized communities — Black, Hispanic and Indigenous populations — that disproportionately face higher rates of chronic illness, shorter life expectancies and poorer health outcomes.
For many students from underrepresented backgrounds, a medical career feels out of reach. The path to becoming a doctor is daunting, full of obstacles like financial hardship, lack of mentorship and systemic inequities in education. Many students are sidelined long before they consider medical school, while those who persist face an uphill battle competing against peers with far more resources and support.
To mitigate these disparities, we must look beyond our hospitals and medical schools and into the places where young minds are shaped: our K-12 classrooms. Early exposure to health care careers can ignite curiosity and show students that they belong in places where they have historically been excluded.
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.
Organizations like the Florida State University College of Medicine, with its “Science Students Together Reaching Instructional Diversity and Excellence” (SSTRIDE) program, are leading the way in breaking down barriers to medical careers for underrepresented students. SSTRIDE introduces middle and high school students to real-world medical environments, giving them firsthand exposure to health care settings that might otherwise feel distant or inaccessible. Then, the program threads together long-term mentorship, academic enrichment and extracurricular opportunities to build the confidence and skills students need to reach medical school.
The 15 White Coats program in Louisiana takes a complementary but equally meaningful approach: transforming classroom environments by introducing culturally relevant imagery and literature that reflect the diversity of the medical profession. For many students, seeing doctors who look like them — featured in posters or books — can challenge internalized doubts and dismantle societal messages that suggest they don’t belong in medicine. Through fundraising efforts and scholarships, other initiatives from 15 White Coats tackle the financial barriers that disproportionately hinder “minority physician aspirants” from pursuing medical careers.
The impact of these programs can be profound. Research shows that students exposed to careers in science or medicine at an early age are far more likely to pursue these fields later in life. And medical students who belong to underrepresented groups are the most likely to return to underserved communities to practice. Their presence can improve communication, foster patient trust and drive innovation in addressing health challenges unique to those communities.
These programs can even have a ripple effect on families and entire communities. When young people pursue careers in medicine, they become role models for siblings, friends and neighbors. This creates a culture of aspiration in which success feels both possible and accessible, shifting societal perceptions and inspiring future generations to aim higher.
But programs like 15 White Coats and SSTRIDE cannot thrive without sustained investment. We need personal and financial commitments to dismantle the systemic barriers that prevent students from underrepresented groups from entering medicine.
Policymakers and educators must step up. Federal and state educational funding should prioritize grants for schools that partner with hospitals, medical schools and health care organizations. These partnerships should offer hands-on experiences like shadowing programs, medical summer camps and health care-focused career fairs. Medical professionals also have a role to play — they can volunteer as mentors or guest speakers, offering valuable guidance and demystifying the path to a medical career.
As a medical student, I know how transformative these experiences can be. They can inspire students to envision themselves in roles they might never have imagined and gain the confidence to pursue dreams that once seemed out of reach.
Let’s be clear, representation in medicine is not about optics. It’s about improving health outcomes and driving meaningful change. Building a stronger, more diverse pipeline to the medical profession is not just an educational priority. It’s a public health imperative.
An investment in young minds today is an investment in a health care system that represents, understands and serves everyone. Equity in health care starts long before a patient walks into a doctor’s office. It begins in the classroom.
Surya Pulukuri is a member of the class of 2027 at Harvard Medical School.
This story about health equity was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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In a minorly famous letter to the duchess of Sutherland, Henry James advises that The Ambassadors should be read “very easily and gently,” specifying that his correspondent should ideally “read five pages a day.” At this pace, the duchess would have taken almost exactly 13 weeks to finish the book if she read every day of the week. One imagines that the novel would be tucked into otherwise inaccessibly glamorous, luxurious days for the duchess, days filled with, among other comforts, corresponding with James about how to read his latest novel.
Five pages a day is very slow reading, but most of us would love to approach our reading at a more leisurely pace, if not a pace determined so prescriptively. On the other side of the spectrum of reading experiences, one finds the average student in college English classes—both undergraduate and graduate. To use my experience as an example, I was at the nadir of my reading life as an undergraduate English major; as someone who naturally reads quite slowly, I spent many nights of my undergraduate career standing at my dresser so I wouldn’t fall asleep while reading. (I couldn’t afford, and doubt I had ever heard of, a standing desk at that point in my life, and my dresser was the tallest piece of furniture in my room.)
While doing this, I often took notes blindly in a notebook with my right hand while I held whatever book I was reading in my left. I would reread my notes the next morning to help me remember what I had read the night before. I loved the books I was reading, and I wanted to succeed in the classes I took, but I was also, by trying to read upward of 500 pages a week, making myself miserable.
I don’t blame the professors who assigned the reading—all of them were gifted pedagogues, and not all of them assigned too much reading. They, too, inhabited a culture in which they were expected to work quickly and fulfill numerous demanding institutional roles (years later, I still remember one of my undergraduate professors saying she worked around 70 hours a week).
Now that I’m on the other side of the academic experience, however, I’ve come to realize that each of us is responsible for resisting a culture that is, by all accounts, making students anxious, depressed and—dare I say it—unproductive at unprecedented rates. Students in undergraduate classes are primed to work quickly. Almost every part of their life—their experience on social media, their online shopping, their use of ChatGPT to complete assignments and their selection of a route on Apple Maps—is designed to help them reach tangible and intangible destinations as quickly as possible. Most students, meanwhile, are terrible at working slowly.
As academicians, we’re constricted, of course, by all the reasonable and unreasonable demands placed on us by work, family and the other important parts of life, and when we read—especially when we read for professional, critical purposes—we read and work as quickly as possible, that “possible” being an ever-nebulous boundary toward which we strain and suffer while still trying to produce quality work. As professors, if we read books like The Ambassadors, we’re likely to read them in bursts and chunks—butcherly words that sound as unappealing as the process of reading a dense, beautiful novel in such a manner actually is.
While we cannot, in the immediate future, totally alter the institutional structures of postsecondary liberal arts education, there are still things that English professors can do to resist the pressure for speed. Chief among them is to design a classroom that encourages our students to go slow.
In their 2016 book, The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber challenged the culture of speed in academia by advising faculty to work more slowly, a laudable goal, but one that critics pointed out was a luxury that untenured faculty simply couldn’t enjoy. The problem, of course, is that the people who design a job decide how much work ought to be accomplished in a given time frame, and untenured faculty have little control over the amount of work they are expected to produce to attain job security. However, what almost all professors, regardless of contract status, do have control over is how much work we require within a given time frame from the students we teach. In other words, we should design classes that treat our students in a way that we’d like our institutions to treat us.
As English professors, our job is not to encourage quick thinking but to foster thorough, imaginative and critical thinking. To do this, we must design our courses to foster and prompt slow work that breaks students out of the habits of expediency they have developed throughout their time in school. Designing classes that foster intentional slowness takes effort, but it also means that we can craft the kinds of spaces that make literature enjoyable and show students the value and beauty of literary texts when they are encountered in an environment suitable for literary consumption.
A slow classroom can take several forms. In the slow classes I’ve taught, it means requiring students to purchase paper copies of the texts we read and to keep a real, physical journal in which they respond to prompts weekly outside of class. I also do something in these classes that I wish someone had done for me when I was a student: I make it clear that they should spend a certain amount of time on work for my class outside the classroom but that they should also give themselves a cutoff time, especially when it comes to reading for class. I tell them that I take around two or three minutes to read a page of a novel well, sometimes more if the prose is dense, and that they should plan for each page of reading to take three to four minutes. I also tell them that if they make time to read and don’t finish, they shouldn’t panic; they should move on with their day and enjoy the nonacademic parts of their life.
Most importantly, I assign less reading. Of course, I’d love to live in a world where my students have thoroughly read the English literary canon (whatever that means), but more than anything, I want them to have read something and to have read it well. To this end, I try to assign between 20 and 30 pages of reading per class meeting, which amounts to around 10 to 15 pages per day, not too far from James’s edict. Rather than just assigning this reading and hoping for the best, I explain to my students about why I assign this number of pages, talk to them about creating and choosing a time and space to read in their daily lives, and describe the process of reading in my class as one they should understand as a reprieve from the time-pressured demands of other courses.
In class, I designate much of our time together as technology-free in order to make space for the rich and meaningful conversations that occur most fruitfully when we aren’t distracted by notifications from our phones and laptops. Students engage in small group and classwide discussions, and I challenge them with daily questions that push them out of their comfort zones. I task them with coming up with steel man arguments in support of cultural and fictional villains, I ask them to articulate what makes a good life by finding evidence for and theories of good lives in their reading, and I frequently make them dwell with a given scene until we’ve extracted every last bit of sense (and often a bit of senselessness) from it.
We tackle around one question a day, if we’re lucky. But the answers and questions we walk away with are finer and fuller than the formulaic answers that students give when they’re in a hurry. In return for designing my class in a way that allows students to work slowly, I expect around the same amount of essayistic output in terms of page numbers, but I design essays to be completed slowly, too, by scaffolding the work and requiring creative responses to prompts to encourage the slow, critical thinking and writing that English professors long to read and rarely encounter. I’ve received work that was thoughtful and occasionally even beautiful, work that couldn’t have been written by AI.
In many ways, my experience of earnestly trying to read around 500 pages of fiction a week as an undergraduate might seem anachronistic. Professors across disciplines have noted the apparent inability of students to engage with any extended reading, whether this means they’re not reading at all or that they just ask ChatGPT to do the “reading” for them. The irony of worrying—as many academics seem to be doing these days—that students will use artificial intelligence to read or write for them is that many undergraduate classes require students to work like machines, to read and write at a breakneck pace, a demand that prompts the ridiculous phenomenon of classes on speed reading, which many universities advertise and which are also available online (the one I’ve linked here is accompanied by the terrifying motto “Reading at the Speed of Thought™”).
In a discipline for which the core method is close reading, the idea of students reading a novel as quickly as possible ought to make English professors shudder, and while it’s not necessary to dedicate an entire semester to a single novel, we ought to see course design as part of the solution to students rushing through their work. In an age that privileges fast work, near-constant availability and answers on demand, the slow English classroom is a reprieve, a space where deep, creative and inspired thought is given the time it needs to blossom.
While our students will likely never occupy the rarefied spaces that the duchess of Sutherland enjoyed when James wrote to her in 1903, with our guidance and course design, they can experience the joy, power and, yes, the luxury of reading and writing slowly. We just have to give them the time.
Luke Vines is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University. He recently began serving as the assistant director for academic support at Berry College.
Throughout the past few years we have definitely been part of a Zoom and Microsoft Team centric world. As we meet with teams and individuals, we have to account for the life that is happening on the other side of the screen. Through Zoom we have a unique opportunity to gain a glimpse into another person’s life to which we would normally not have access.
This means that we have a moral and ethnical responsibility as peers and as leaders to genuinely care about the people to which we are communicate with on Zoom. Here’s a great resource from the Collective Impact Forum (http://www.collectiveimpactforum.org).
The Team Color Check-In Tool is a communication tool to help people in virtual and face-to-face conversations have a check-in. The colors range from:
Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Gray
If you are wondering how to apply this for your teams or classrooms, I would definitely recommend the following:
#1 – Utilize it when you meet with individuals one-on-one (BEFORE) the meeting.
#2 – Utilize it in Zoom via an anonymous poll to gauge how their audience is feeling BEFORE the meeting and providing resources at the end of the meeting (or in a follow-up email).
#3 – Send the check-in tool to your team/organization at the beginning of the week and provide workshops and support throughout the week for the team.
Respond Below – How would you use the resource? Do you think teams would benefit from this resource? How would you modify it?
Thanks for reading!
Sincerely, Dr. Jennifer T. Edwards Professor of Communication
Executive Director of the Texas Social Media Research Institute & Rural Communication Institute
In The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary StudyDr. Rachel Sagner Buurma, Associate Professor of English at Swarthmore College, and Dr. Laura Heffernan, Associate Professor of English at the University of North Florida, turn to archives from the actual classrooms of major literary critics of the past century to see what the available course documents tell about the history of the teaching of literature. This approach contrasts with existing histories, such as Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature, which are based on archives of published works about teaching rather than archives of teaching itself. While this book will naturally interest literature teachers most, I think that Buurma and Heffernan’s methods and findings have wider implications across academia. Every discipline has a pedagogical past to learn from and a future to archive for. One of the most surprising findings in the book is that landmark works of literary scholarship often had tangible roots in classrooms. Seeing this documented helps us better appreciate that the classroom is a site of disciplinary scholarship in its own right. I’m grateful to Buurma and Heffernan for this fascinating historical work and for responding to my questions over email.
CORRIGAN: I’m interested in the origin of the project. What prompted you to turn to archives of actual classrooms? What gave you the idea that you might find a different history of literary study there than what has previously been found based on archives of scholarly publications?
BUURMA & HEFFERNAN: Well, the project really began as an attempt to investigate how the New Critics actually taught. We had both heard New Critical pedagogy invoked over and over again as the foundation for how literary scholars teach, even if they are practicing historicism in their scholarship. And mentioning the New Criticism immediately brought to mind the familiar image of a professor leading students in a close reading of a single poem on a page. But what, we wondered, was this imaginary of the New Critical classroom predicated upon? New Critics wrote *about* teaching in their major works: Cleanth Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn, for example, begins with a classroom scene in which the student senses the aesthetic value of Wordworth’s Westminster Bridge sonnet but needs to have that native critical judgment nurtured and amplified and modeled by the teacher through practices of closely attending to not just what the poem says but how he says it. But how did Brooks actually teach?
So we started there, and luck had it that Brooks’s papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale included transcriptions of not just his lectures but his students’ comments and questions from his Modern Poetry course (he had planned to publish a book of his lectures, and these complete transcripts were to be the basis). So, we were able to get a real sense of the ups and downs of his classroom hour; the kinds of unexpected queries he fielded from students; the historical facts he included or even misreported; and the ways that the sheer time that he spent on certain poems (like Marianne Moore’s “Poetry,” which he deemed a “failure”) belied a different kind of literary valuation at work than his stated theoretical account of what makes good poems good.
From there, we saw that there was a lot to be learned—indeed a whole other disciplinary narrative—by witnessing how scholars taught alongside what they wrote. We went to see, in the same spirit, how other foundational formalist critics including Eliot and Richards taught in their classrooms. But we also began to wonder and investigate what kinds of teaching were happening in other kinds of institutions in these same moments. Scholarly publications—particularly those manifestoes or arguments over how we should teach or read or research—tend to overrepresent figures at elite institutions. So looking at teaching instead gives us back a sense of the much bigger field of practice in these eras.
CORRIGAN: Early in the book, you stress that your book is a history of teaching—not an endorsement of how the particular teachers in your study taught (p. 17). But as I read, I kept finding things these teachers were doing really creative and interesting, such as Edith Rickert having her students create visual representations of elements of style in a text (p. 99). Were there times in your research where you thought, “Oh, that is good teaching” or even “I’m going to use that in my classroom”?
BUURMA & HEFFERNAN: Yes—and we think it’s actually a testament to how creative and interesting and maybe above all experimental literature teaching has been—we weren’t looking for model practices or assignments, but so much of what we came across seems worth stealing for our own classrooms, even though we try hard in the book to point out that we’re not holding up these figures as examples of Great Teachers or—what would be even less useful—suggesting that somehow teaching in the past used to be better and that we need to return to some previous, unfallen state of literature teaching! Because we don’t think that at all. In fact, one of the things that prompted us to write the book in the first place was knowing how hard we were working to learn to teach well in our own classrooms, how much time we were spending inventing new courses and assignments and little strategies for solving problems we ran into in the classroom, and how we saw that—despite omnipresent messages in higher ed about how bad college and university teaching is!—most of our colleagues and friends in the profession were working hard at being engaged, effective teachers and were often using really inventive methods to help their students learn. And we realized that no matter how many professors of literature were doing that, somehow engaged, effective teaching was always being framed as exception or unusual, and not the norm—and the norm, despite what we saw in our everyday professional lives, was always framed as this boring unengaged research who hating being in the classroom and just droned on to a lecture hall of bored students. So we thought that it was likely that if the present of teaching looked very different than official stories about it, there was a good chance that the past of teaching would look very different as well, if we could figure out how to find it.
And like you, other people also seem to have found the practices we document in the book useful. In his review of the book, Ben Hagen writes that:
The Teaching Archive is not a “How To” guide, yet Buurma and Heffernan acknowledge that “some of the past teaching [they] describe seems new and exciting now” (17). I can confirm that reading and rereading The Teaching Archive is pedagogically generative. This past semester (Spring 2021), inspired by the example of Spurgeon, I asked graduate students to create personal indexes of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. As we learn in chapter one, Spurgeon’s 1913 Art of Reading course did not conclude with an academic research paper but led students “just [up to] the point where [they] would begin to write a research paper,” working slowly through a process of studying, note taking, and “coordinat[ing] information into knowledge” (30, 31). Index-making, according to Spurgeon, is far from a “banal scholarly practice[]”; it is, rather, a “thoughtful” activity that “encode[s]” the values and perspectives of any given indexer—“recording this and not that, subordinating one point to another” (36). Building an index of a text, or an anthology, reveals networks of ideas as well as chains of citations and references, “set[s] of strands that you can reorder and reconnect” (36). This research emphasis on note taking and indexing—not paper writing—encourages students to make something and also to acquire a personal hold on obscure or difficult material; moreover, this activity leaves students (including mine, I hope) with a surviving record of what mattered to them in their studies, an organized set of data that they can “then recompose . . . into the shapes of [later] interpretations and arguments” (37).
CORRIGAN: One practical takeaway from your book might be an encouragement for teachers to more carefully archive our teaching materials. You mention, for instance, how rare it was to have “meticulously preserved” teaching notes like those of Caroline Spurgeon (p. 25). Do you document your own teaching any differently now that you’ve written this book?
BUURMA & HEFFERNAN: Haha, no! We should but we don’t, really. We always mean to take good notes about a class—what worked and what didn’t—but fail to do so nearly every term. (Josephine MIles, one of the poet-scholar-teachers we write about, jotted a very short and charming version of this end-of-term notes-for-next-time in one of her English 1A notebooks, which simply read: “Kill error + model style / Rouse C’s / Personal confs before midterms.”) Our teaching documents themselves are well stored because they’ve been made in word processors from the beginning. And of course, that big archive is keyword searchable—we’ve both had the uncanny experience of discovering a document of teaching notes on a relatively obscure text that we were looking up to cite or read for the first time (no kidding!).
CORRIGAN: On a related note, it strikes me that, just as your book was coming out, the pandemic forced so many teachers to do some pretty intensive archiving by making all aspects of our courses available electronically in various online, remote, and hybrid formats. Of course, intentionally online courses existed before the pandemic. But the scale we just saw was unprecedented. Do you have any thoughts on what this past year or so of teaching under these conditions might mean for cultivating “the teaching archive” going forward?
BUURMA & HEFFERNAN: Well, one thing we worry about is how much of that archive now exists within Learning Management Systems. Canvas, for example, is set up to encourage you to build out your “How to Revise a Thesis” handouts or your introductory notes on a novelist within the platform itself rather than linking to or embedding external documents. Feedback, too, often happens within the LMS. Laura, for example, has had to be really mindful about all of this because she saw how much of her own teaching record was disappearing from her personal computer—she’d go to write a recommendation letter for a former student and realize she had no record of the students’ work or her feedback on it to access. And another thing we worry about is the extent to which universities have tried to capture intellectual property in individual instructors’ courses in the chaos of everything going remote; we probably don’t even yet know to what extent this has happened at various universities. That’s an issue that faculty and faculty unions are paying more and more attention to, we think, but there aren’t really uniform practices or policies around this yet—and of course, many people don’t have a union and then advocacy for faculty around this issue can end up getting lost, or happening in piecemeal ways.
But you’re right that all of those issues and attendant dangers aside, there are a lot of exciting possibilities for what we might be able to know about teaching during this moment because of how much of it was happening remotely and has left more traces than usual—video recordings and transcripts and probably millions of hours of voicethreads and video assignments and blog posts and text chats. And we also noticed that more instructors were entering into the classrooms of instructors at other institutions. The two of us, for example, recorded lectures together, podcast style, for one of Laura’s UNF classes earlier this year, and we saw many other visits and guest lectures being organized on social media during that time. This kind of growing awareness of what’s going on not just within your colleagues’ classrooms but across different kinds of institutions seems really, really promising to us because it could serve not just as a foundation for stronger subfield scholarship but potentially also a foundation for the kind of cross-institutional labor organizing that disciplinary formations will need to nurture more and more.
CORRIGAN: Your history of literary study focuses on the teaching of “major literary scholars” (p. 3), in part so that you can contrast their writing about the discipline with their teaching of the discipline and in part (I’m imagining) because major scholars are the ones most likely to have their papers archived. But I’m curious, do you have any guesses about how different your history might look if it had been possible or practical to look at an even broader range of teachers—especially the great majority who are not major literary scholars, not well known at all?
BUURMA & HEFFERNAN: Yes—we focus on major literary scholars for exactly the reasons you describe, but part of what we found is that research is happening in tandem with teaching for everyone, whether they are writing major critical monographs, editing important collections, and publishing widely read public writing or not. This is partly because teaching itself requires research—when we prepare to teach classes, most of us find ourselves reading scholarly articles, tracking down new sources and texts, and searching out how peers past and present have taught a given text, topic, or course. All of that is literary studies research, even though we might not always recognize what we do when we prepare classes as research, and even though there’s no way to put that work down as research on a cv or make it count as research in an annual review. So we’re hopeful that we’ve written a history that opens up to the work of the great majority you mention.
CORRIGAN: I love your observation that most of literary studies takes place in classrooms. You write, “literary value seems to emanate from texts, but is actually made by people. And classrooms are the core site where this collective making can be practiced and witnessed” (p. 6). When we teach, we’re not transmitting literary studies to students for later. We’re doing literary studies with them right now. That feels revolutionary. What might change, would you guess, if more of us who teach literature consciously adopted this stance—that our courses are not about the discipline, they are the discipline?
BUURMA & HEFFERNAN: We’ve thought about this question a lot. We think it’s an insight that a lot of teachers understand, in a tacit way, through their practice. For example, there’s a line in our introduction just past what you quote here that reads, “The answer to the question, ‘Did I miss anything last week?’ is ‘Yes, and you missed it forever’” that REALLY resonated with readers. People shared that excerpt on Twitter more than any other part of the book. Because we all do know that what we’re doing in these classrooms is much more than content transfer—we’re creating knowledge!—but it’s relatively rare to see that insight ratified within the institutions in which we work, and so it’s difficult for teachers to really keep hold of it as a conscious insight about our everyday work. And if we could really hang on to the fact that we are actually creating literary value in our classrooms, we think we’d not only see new differences AND new connections to the work of other disciplines, but we’d also have a better sense of how literary studies is in some ways distinct—and so perhaps we’d be more consistent at describing and claiming the expertise we exercise in our teaching, and thus better equipped to advocate for the conditions we need in order to do that teaching well.
Because if it’s rare for the institutions in which we work to ratify (or even be able to get out of the way of) that insight, it’s even rarer to have the kind of labor this teaching entails valued by those institutions. In her “Money on the Left” podcast appearance about her book, The Order of Forms, Anna Kornbluh pointed to just this section of The Teaching Archive:
But people need time for teaching. And that means that they need small class sizes, they need workable loads, and they need the ability to have preparation that involves reading new things and changing their course syllabi all the time and like genuinely encountering and making ideas happen in the classroom. There’s this line in Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s book, The Teaching Archive, about how like in the humanities you deal with students saying like, “I couldn’t make it to class, what did I miss?” And they say, “You missed everything and you missed it forever.” Because we make the knowledge happen in that haptic, collaborative, and dynamic moment of mutual determination of meaning. That is what you missed. So I think we need time for research driven teaching and research generative teaching. And what we also know is that it is just emphatically and empirically good for students, about small class sizes, about a lot of individual attention, about a lot of dynamic kind of evolution of what’s on the syllabus, and a lot of in-person collective work.
