Pete's Teaching Topics and Learning Outcomes

Topics:

I'll start with the big three: race, class, and gender. These could be separate topics, but my outcomes are the same for all three.

Outcomes:
Students should demonstrate:

• a broad knowledge of the changing definitions of "race," "class," and "gender" throughout history
• an understanding of the complex debates surrounding these terms more recently in American Studies
• an understanding of how these terms work in American culture
  

I could have chosen a number of other terms that get listed with the big three: nation, dis/ability, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. But I thought I'd start with these. (In fact, in my own teaching, I focus much more on race, gender, and nation than I do class.) And I could have just as easily chosen "identity" or "culture" as topics, too.

Importance:
For undergraduates being introduced to American Studies, an understanding of the use of these terms is crucial. Just about everything I have read in graduate school (and a good bit of what I read as an undergraduate) engages one or more of these terms explicitly or implicitly; from my experience, they are a part of the language of academia in the humanities. An understanding of these terms will help students recognize them when they come up in future courses and conversation.

I have found that most undergraduates, and a good portion of the general public, tend to think of race, class, and gender as fixed categories (even if we experience them as not so fixed); thus, students can dismiss conversations about them as needlessly combative or uncomfortable. A broad historical look at race, class, and gender shows them to be fluid categories, whose definitions change with (even while they define) social relations at different moments in history. A look at recent debates about these terms is intended to offer models for engaging in well-informed conversation, as well as allow for the possibility of these terms remaining fluid and always up for debate. These conversations often happen in culture, and so understanding how a song can be "about" race or a hairstyle "about" gender helps students engage in their world as they also participate in these debates.