The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

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Kajsa K. Henry, Florida A&M University

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On July 1, 2022, Florida’s Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act (Stop WOKE) took effect. The new law, also known as House Bill 7 (HB 7), regulates how topics of history, race, and sexuality can be taught in the K-20 educational system in Florida and imposes stiff sanctions for violations. However, on March 17, 2023, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals let stand the temporary injunction until they issue a decision on the merits of the bill. As of August 2024, a formal decision on the constitutionality of this act has yet to be decided. Despite this victory, the threat of how one teaches about race and other important topics in Florida and the nation remains under attack. Within this climate, the ways in which I teach writing and literature at Florida A&M University, the only public historically black college or university (HBCU) in the state, has the possibility of increased scrutiny and restrictions. In fact, for the last two years, professors here have had to submit syllabi to an appointed steward of their select colleges for scrutiny. Although not “officially” linked to HB7, threats to the autonomy of professors to construct their classroom space seem destined to continue. It is within this context that I began to reimagine the teaching of James Baldwin in a writing course at an HBCU as a combined effort to put into practice an emancipatory pedagogy while encouraging students to develop several habits of mind associated with American Studies.

For true fans of his writing, Baldwin never faded as an important and necessary voice. However, his words found renewed attention in both academic and popular publications at the beginning of what many now label as the Black Lives Matter era. For instance, in 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates found inspiration in the form and subject matter of Baldwin’s foundational text, The Fire Next Time, in his national book award winning memoir Between the World and Me. Several think pieces, such as Jaqueline Woodson’s “Why James Baldwin Still Matters” (2016), Teju Cole’s “Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin’s ‘Stranger in the Village’” (2014), and Felicia R. Lee’s “Trying to Bring James Baldwin’s Complex Voice Back to the Classroom (2016) led the call to revive Baldwin to provide continued insight on the United States race issues. Then, in 2016, a collection of essays, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks of Race, emerged that included some of the leading African American voices of our time, like Jesmyn Ward, Kevin Young, and Kiese Laymon, giving context and hope as they wrestled with history and the present. In addition, Raoul Peck’s documentary I am Not Your Negro reimagined Baldwin’s place in history by presenting him alongside towering figures of the Civil Rights Movement. Most recently, in 2020, Eddie S. Gaude Jr. published Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own that once again looked to Baldwin for ways to navigate the continuing racial divides.

This renewed interest in Baldwin and my own desire to in some way not feel helpless in the current climate, led to, in the fall of 2016, me choosing The Fire Next Time as the secondary text for ENC 1102, or the freshman writing course here at FAMU that focuses on the teaching of research writing skills. In previous semesters, I had chosen Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi to bring attention to the Civil Rights Movement and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower to discuss the relationship between place, race, and identity. Throughout these efforts to find the best text to meet my needs, those of the course, and my students’ needs, I found myself stuck with the dilemma of adhering to my departmental requirement of using traditional literary forms (short stories and the novel) to teach research writing skills or to better align the course with my own pedagogical belief that the types of critical thinking, reading, and writing skills that the students needed could be better met by expanding the types of texts they read and wrote about. This, coupled with my multi-layered disenchantment with teaching, led me to search for answers as I consumed more and more of Baldwin’s work. Finally, in Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers,” I found an answer:” Baldwin notes that “the purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself […] To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.” In this short section, Baldwin provides a sense of purpose to the educator, especially during moments of social unrest, to equip our students with the tools necessary to question and think critically about the information that they see, hear, and read.  I give this extended account for how I arrived at bringing Baldwin into the writing classroom because it happened within a particular historical context and reflects my own efforts to reconcile the frustrations that I felt teaching writing. The renewed scholarly and public interest in Baldwin, particularly within this moment, provided an opportunity for me to shift how I teach my students to critically think, read, and write while also developing their social consciousness.

 Therefore, for almost eight years, Baldwin’s works served as the foundational texts for my ENC 1102 courses thematically structured around researching and writing about “race” and the American experience. I made this decision not only because I am a self-proclaimed Baldwinite, but because he speaks so profoundly to our contemporary social issues surrounding “race” that he confronted in his works years earlier. In addition, his works challenge student readers to critically think and engage on a frequency that I believe helps them to develop skills necessary for the types of reading and writing they will encounter not only throughout their matriculation, but beyond. Although not known for having a formal or systematic writing pedagogy, mining his ideas about writing, literature, and education offer valuable insights into teaching and learning within the context of the writing classroom. Baldwin’s engagement with themes of personal experience and identity, language and voice, social and political engagement, empathy and understanding, and honesty and authenticity are all themes that should resonate with young adults. Combined with his mastery of the essay form, Baldwin’s exploration of these themes confirms why centering him in a writing classroom, especially at a Historically Black College or University (HBCU), makes sense. However, placing him there, especially while navigating national and state political policies and departmental restraints requires a radical shift. In this essay, I make the case for how HBCUs can develop writing programs that draw on the transdisciplinary structure of American Studies by using Baldwin’s writings, and those of his literary sons and daughters, to teach students to see research-based thinking, rhetoric, and composition as integral to their disciplines and as a necessary transgressive act. By sharing the methodology behind the construction of my course and the successes (and failures) of the course, I propose that it may serve as a model for the type of transdisciplinary work that writing courses participate in and inspire in their students.

 

Baldwin and the Ethics of Writing

One of Baldwin’s famous pieces of advice to teachers comes in his 1963 speech, “A Talk to Teachers.”[1] He invites educators to take on the responsibility of addressing racism in America and empowering students to view their education as revolutionary and necessary in the fight for justice. However, he recognizes the irony and difficulty of viewing education in this way:

The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it—at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change. (p. 83)

For Baldwin, then, education requires a continual questioning of the world in which one lives that then influences how one sees themselves and that same world. He ends the essay by describing what he, if he was a teacher of black children, would teach: “I would try to make them know — that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal” ( He goes on to list that he would also encourage them to question popular culture, the news, and their own sense of themselves. Most importantly, he says, “I would teach him that he doesn’t have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything” (Baldwin, 1963, p. 81). Baldwin outlines the process that forces one to move from a state of blissful ignorance to one that results in a complete disruption of the norm. Of course, Baldwin’s context for writing these words came at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the murders of John F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers, and the four girls killed in the 16^th Street Baptist church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, along with the murder of two young black boys that same week in Birmingham. So, without question, this context influenced his view of the purpose of education that forced him to ask what one can do to change the world in which we live. However, we are living and teaching within a similar moment of emergency. Like Clint Smith (2017) acknowledges, “A Talk to Teachers” showed me that a teacher’s work should reject the false pretense of being apolitical, and, instead, confront the problems that shape our students’ lives.”

Before penning “A Talk to Teachers” in 1963, Baldwin visited the complex landscape of Florida A&M University (FAMU) and met professors facing the dilemma of teaching with that historical context and students experiencing the process of dealing with the internal and external turmoil associated with a change in consciousness. He documents this experience in “They Can’t Turn Back,” (1960) where he paints a complicated picture of the students he encounters and their ability to fight against “a country that has told itself so many lies about its history, that, in sober fact, has yet to excavate its history from the rubble of romance” (Baldwin, 1960). Baldwin’s assessment of the students, school officials, and the residents of the city of Tallahassee reveals much, even now over sixty years later, about the nature of the environment that black college students at FAMU, an HBCU largely committed to educating mostly black students but that must also contend with the State requirements that wants to restrict academic conversations designed to unpack the hegemonic structures of white supremacy and systemic racism. By the time Baldwin leaves FAMU, he believes that the possibility for change lies in the actions of these students because “they are the only people in this country now who really believe in freedom. Insofar as they can make it real for themselves, they will make it real for all of us. The question with which they present the nation is whether or not we really want to be free” (Baldwin, 1960). While still unsure of what lies ahead for them, Baldwin leaves with an optimistic view of the students at FAMU. However, over sixty years later, a similar racialized political atmosphere exists and the same questions that Baldwin poses remain central to how I navigate his call to be transgressive and view education as a revolutionary act.

The role of education within the African American community has always had a transgressive edge that remained central to black activism. In Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, Jarvis Givens constructs a narrative beginning with those early enslaved people learning to read to teachers during the Jim Crow era to document black people continuously engaged in subversive practices of teaching and learning. Using Carter G. Woodson as an example of this type of work, Givens makes larger claims to insist that

fugitive pedagogy was the work of a witness teacher, a plot not for equality or integration –because even when those terms were deployed, they never fully represented the political desires as the heart of the movement---but for something new entirely: transformed curriculum, a transformed way of defining what it means to be human, a transformed way of knowing. Fugitive pedagogy was grounded by a liberatory scholastic vision, not just of school but also of the world. (p. 232)

Givens and Baldwin views on the function of education for students and teachers reveals the transformative possibilities of looking at yourself in relation to the world around you. For Baldwin, students begin this process by looking intently at the world around them, asking questions that demand research and reevaluation, and then renegotiating with this new knowledge to shape key definitions of self and the world. For teachers, like me who embrace this fugitive pedagogy that Givens outlines, the role remains to provide students the opportunity to participate in this process through the adaptation of pedagogical practices that are at their foundation transgressive, transdisciplinary, and liberatory. In this next section, I will provide an overview of the structure of my ENC 1102 courses while showing the transdisciplinary nature of a freshman research-based course that takes seriously providing students the opportunity to think critically about their world. 

 

The Structural Evolution of the Course

On the first day of class, I always ask if any of the students have heard of Baldwin or read any of his works. Often only 1 or 2 hands would be raised. I However, they only often recalled reading “Sonny’s Blues,” one of Baldwin’s most anthologized and taught short stories. I am always disheartened that he is not being taught more, but also delighted to be able to introduce them to Baldwin. I encounter students years later who thank me for introducing them to him. I even had a student who took my ENC 1102 course reference Baldwin in another African American literature course. She reminded me that she learned about Baldwin in that course, and she connected it perfectly to the present context. As a way of beginning the introduction to Baldwin, I use documentaries during the first week of class to introduce Baldwin. In addition, this serves as a way to also begin the discussion of elements of research and argumentation as they responded to the content and structure of these documents. In the early iterations of the course, I used The Price of the Ticket (1989), narrated by Baldwin that takes sweeping examination of his life, travels, and the historical context of his formative years. In 2017, I switched to using Raoul Peck’s I am Not Your Negro, which introduces many of Baldwin’s thematic concerns but focuses less on the biographical elements. During the first week of the semester, I use Peck’s I am Not Your Negro to begin the work of introducing and contextualizing Baldwin. Often, only a couple of students in each class have heard of Baldwin, so it is always a treat to introduce him to a new set of readers. Peck’s documentary is a study in research and argumentation as he draws connections between the past and the present in the themes he highlighted and the connections he made with the Black Lives Matter era. I resist the urge to give an in-depth introduction of Baldwin and allow them to meet in through the eyes of Peck and how he positions him at the crossroads between the past and the present and who I like to call the 3Ms, Malcom X, MLK Jr, and Medger Evers. After watching the film, either together or on their own, I ask a series of questions to get them thinking about the audience, purpose, and rhetorical strategies of the film to gauge their critical thinking, reading, and writing skills and if they understand the mode of writing a summary. I first ask them to identify Peck’s purpose in the film and what they learned about Baldwin. Most of them comment on the accuracy of Baldwin’s words, but also relay that they also learned a new understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and its relationship to now. I also ask them to list and name the various types of research Peck used in the film and why he structured the film in the way that he did. This allows them to see, if they haven’t been taught previously, the similarities in “reading” a visual text and a written one. 

The journal assignments associated with the documentary asks them to discuss the structure and the ways that he combined and used research throughout the documentary. Here is an example of a journal prompt used to get them to think beyond the content to consider the argumentation involved with the director’s use of research materials:

After watching I Am Not Your Negro think about the research that Raoul Peck did to construct the documentary film. What is the documentary’s purpose (try to name it in one sentence)? How does the research and how he presents it help establish this purpose? For your writing activity, discuss ONE way that he utilized a form of research and how it contributed to his purpose (i.e. his use of movie or clips of Baldwin or the typewriter font). This paragraph should be 8-10 sentences.

In discussions and journal posts after, the students recognized the importance of Baldwin’s words and unique perspective. However, they often felt that Baldwin’s elevated language and forceful delivery often obstructed his meaning. I Am Not Your Negro proved to be a better documentary choice for centering the conversation around research and showing the connective threads between Baldwin’s views on the Civil Rights Movement through his thoughts on the 3Ms and their present concerns about race, protest, and identity. Shifting to this documentary also contributed to the continued evolution of the shape of the course into an intentional effort to encourage students to see writing as a tool for connecting self with the larger world.

By the conclusion of the second week, the students have begun the process of understanding the connectedness between text, context, research, and analysis or doing what Adam Golub and Adam Wise, American Studies scholars, call “connecting imagination.” Golub defines this as a “habit of mind that can shape how we assimilate knowledge, how we conceptualize problems, and how we learn to see and interpret the patterns and silences and histories of everyday life” (p. 128). For Golub, “contextualizing is more than just an academic exercise; it is a way of understanding the world” (p. 128). In his recent reassessment of the field of American Studies during the age of Trump, Golub believes that a

renewed public interest in context as an interpretive tool represents an opportunity for the field of American Studies to share what it knows and does well, and to redouble its efforts to teach students how to contextualize in a meaningful way. The notion that context is key to interpretation is certainly not new to American Studies. American Studies has long been concerned with context as a constituent, if not a defining element, of its interdisciplinary mode of inquiry.” (p. 116)

I explain to them that I have just modeled, and they have participated in, the process we will continue throughout the semester of developing context. Bringing the way that American Studies thinks about context to bear on how I teach writing begins with them understanding their lives as connected to the context that the film builds, continues with their interaction with Baldwin and the voices of his literary sons and daughters, and ends with their research topics.

 Baldwin’s understanding of the personal within the collective can be found in many of his essays that could be used to establish his pedagogy surrounding education. However, the two essays found in The Fire Next Time serve as the key texts that I use in this research-based freshman writing course to expose them to this process. Over the next few weeks of the semester, the students engage in activities designed to teach them how to write a critical response essay on one of Baldwin’s essays. The first goal is to teach the students the important skill of close reading to identify the issues, ideas, and anxieties that resonate in the wider culture. During the first assignment, which requires them to read “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation" (“Letter to My Nephew) and "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” we are able to trace his rhetorical stance and the habits of mind that he presents as key to his own awakening consciousness. I have found that these essays are more accessible for the students while still providing access to some of the key tenets of Baldwin’s thoughts.  By the end of this assignment, the students hopefully begin to adopt a similar rhetorical stance as Baldwin to encourage them to be revolutionary in their thinking and writing habits.

For many students, the first-year writing courses becomes the space where they must ask questions that force them to understand themselves, so Baldwin’s personal essay in “Letter to My Nephew” presents a view of writing that takes the writing from personal to a broader critique of American society. One of the first essays in ENC 1101, the precursor course to ENC 1102, is often the personal essay that invites them to reflect on some aspect of themselves, whether it is their relationship to words or their first experiences of racism or a great achievement. And so, the process of examining themselves begins. In the context of today’s climate, asking students to participate in these types of assignments may face push back from them and from administrators. However, since for many of today’s first year students, the world around them remains a contentious time where political  leaders and the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) are attacking and upheaving a number of the previous achievements surrounding questions of race and equality, encouraging this line of questioning remains a necessity. While many of these students may remain oblivious to how these shifts personally influence them, it is my experience that many of them, like the young students Baldwin met in the 1960s, recognize the importance of these questions. For a student in their first year of college, education may have largely been motivated by outside forces, such as parents or guardians. In college, another layer of self-motivation may become necessary for complete success at that level, including confronting uncomfortable truths about themselves and society.

Therefore, Baldwin’s advice to his nephew in “Letter to My Nephew” provides students with the tools necessary to confront history, systemic injustice, and how they see themselves within that milieu. He tells his nephew that “one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death” (Baldwin, 1993, p. 7).  He continues to warn his nephew of the travails set up for his life: “You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity” (Baldwin, 1993, p. 9). However, Baldwin encourages his nephew to move beyond these preconceived notions put on him from the outside, but to recognize that it is his countrymen who must confront their own fears and only then would he [his nephew] be free to live his life freely. Baldwin’s advice encourages the nephew to confront history in a way that allows for personal growth. Baldwin positions literature and language as tools form liberation, self-examination, and collective transformation. This advice becomes an invaluable way for the students to connect their personal writing done at the beginning of ENC 1101 to the goals of ENC 1102, which allows for a sense of continuity. Baldwin’s use of the letter genre and the personal narrative in the next essay in The Fire Next Time, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” show the benefits of using writing to critically engage with history and identity.

The first formal writing assignment involves the students choosing one of the two essays in The Fire Next Time and writing a critical response to it. Here is the assignment prompt for one version of this assignment:

For this assignment, you will be given a choice of writing a critical/analytical response to one of the essays (“My Dungeon Shook” or “Down at the Cross”) from The Fire This Time. DO NOT do outside research for this paper. In general, you are being asked to choose one of the following tactics to help your reader understand your view on the matters in the essay you've chosen:

1. Analyzing the effectiveness of the text - In this case, the response analyzes the key feature such as the clarity of the main idea, the organization of the argument, the quality of the supporting evidence, and/or the effectiveness of the author's style, tone, and voice.
2. Agreeing and/or disagreeing with the ideas in the text - Often, responders react to the ideas or the argument of the essay. In this case, the writer shows what they disagree with and why they agree and/or disagree with what the author/text says. However, we also want to respond to an argument based on more than just your basic agreement or disagreement with the point. This time, you'll respond based on the logic, structure, and use of appeals in an argument.
3. Interpreting and reflecting on the text – You will explain key passages or examine the underlying assumptions or the implications of the ideas. Often you reflect on how your own experiences, attitudes, and observations relate to the text. Remember, development for your response can come from personal experience, evidence from the text, and evidence from other sources.

For many semesters I continued with the essays in The Fire Next Time as the foundational texts, however, I also experimented with other Baldwin essays, which included “Stranger in the Village,” “Many Thousands Gone,” “Nobody Knows My Name,” and “Fly in the Buttermilk.” I allowed the students to choose one of these texts to write a critical response essay, but only after using The Fire Next Time to teach the foundational skills of writing an academic summary, an analytical thesis, and an analytical paragraph. In this unit, I also introduce the integration of source material and how to introduce, cite, and explain these quotes. Then, the students used these essays to practice those skills in preparation for the next unit, which involves the students adding in another text either in the form of a comparison/contrast essay, conversation, or a synthesis essay (I used different names to introduce the need to read two texts together). Another version of this initial assignment shows the movement to the finalized version of the course:

Identify one or more themes in The Fire Next Time and find a newspaper article (using our library databases) from the past month that contains one or more of these themes. As a way of responding to and noting the relevance of Baldwin’s criticism of the relationship between race and the American experience to today, this essay asks you to draw on the thematic connection you see between the Baldwin and your chosen article.

In this assignment, I ask the students to begin thinking about the persistent relevance of Baldwin’s writing to our current context. Throughout the semesters I used Baldwin as the framing text for the course in some way, but I experimented with different approaches.

In the early iterations of this course, the students would put Baldwin in conversation with one of his other essays or another writer that I introduced for the second formal assignment. I included works from Teju Cole, Eula Biss, Ta-Nehesi Coates, Garnette Cadogan, or articles from a list of best essays discussing race and identity from that year that connected with themes from Baldwin’s essays.  In 2016, however, this section of the course evolved with the publication of The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward, which includes the works of authors who I call the sons and daughters of Baldwin, or contemporary writers using the essay form to question issues of identity, memory, history, race, and the essay form itself. Ward describes it as “a book that would gather new voices in one place, in a lasting, physical form, and provide a forum for those writers to dissent, to call to account, to witness, to reckon” (p. 13). This collection solidified for me the structure of the course as a melding of the past, the present, and the future through the medium of the essay, which allowed students to recognize the continuous threads that existed between Baldwin and the period of the early part of the 21^st century. The publication of The Fire This Time came right at a moment where the Black Lives Matter movement had been existence for a few years and had become a generative space for activism and protest. Thus, my students were looking for an outlet to understand the world in which they were entering and required to critically think about. While Baldwin’s essay often felt a bit removed from the present, especially in terms of his language and cultural references, the essays in The Fire This Time were more accessible while bringing his themes to bear on the present. Here is an example of one of the prompts for this essay:

For this paper, you are to choose two (2) of the following essays/poems ONLY: Baldwin’s “My Dungeon Shook,” Baldwin’s “Down at the Cross,” Cadogan’s “Black and Blue,” Coates’s “Letter to My Son,” Ward’s “Cracking the Code,” Ghansah’s “The Weight,” Walters’s “Lonely in America,” or Brown’s “The Tradition” and write a comparative analysis paper. You will need to perform close readings of both texts to compose a thesis statement that has to be proven using our established analytical paragraph elements. Your analysis can focus on thematic and rhetorical elements of each of the essays. This paper must be 4-6 pages long and include an MLA works cited page, in-text citations, and a title.

In the final version of this course, which I used for a number of semesters, followed the trajectory of beginning with Baldwin, then including assignments associated with the essays in The Fire This Time, and then ending with a research-based essay on topics about race in America.

By the time the students reach the last assignment, they have begun the process of engaging with the six habits of mind that Golub links to American Studies ways of thinking and learning briefly mentioned earlier. He outlines the six habits of the “synthesizing” and “connecting imagination” as: 1) exploring the relationship between identity and culture; 2) seeking out diverse perspectives; 3) placing culture in relevant contexts; 4) studying change over time; 5) interpreting the work of culture; and 6) practicing collaboration and public engagement. He outlines the common approaches to answering questions that often don’t have immediate solutions, which is a central part of the processes of several disciplines doing the work of trying to understand our world. In the first two assignments, the students have both participated in seeing themselves as products of their cultural context and engaging with the writings of others experiencing this same process and how to interpret essays as works of culture. Additionally, they have traced how Baldwin and his “sons and daughters” tracked and interpreted similarities and differences in America’s continual racial milieu. The next essay of the semester is my favorite and has proven to be a favorite of the students as well, and it involves writing a synthesis or a comparison/contrast essay that puts Baldwin and his sons and daughters into conversation. The questions that fuel this essay help to investigate how and if the discourse around the topic has changed and if so, how?

Now, in the research essay, they must answer Baldwin’s challenge to view writing as a tool that can help provide alternative visions of the future: “To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it” (p. 81). Thus, the semester ends with an eight-week research project that has taken on various forms over the years but always includes a presentation of their work at the end of the semester. In the beginning, the essay assignment took on the form of a social commentary:

Your first two essay assignments were designed to focus on specific critical thinking and writing skills. For your first assignment, you learned to understand and summarize authors’ ideas and respond to them by paying attention to Baldwin’s rhetorical strategies. For the second essay, you put two essays into conversation to make your own argument about how looking at both essays together helped to illuminate issues of race in America. In this third essay, by putting multiple voices together (including your own) you will draw together skills from both essays and develop new skills in research.

The result will be a 5-7 page documented essay that offers commentary about a specific aspect, situation, or event related to the topic of race and American experience. A social commentary can take a lot of different forms, but for this assignment, your commentary should analyze what evidence you can observe of this trend, situation, issue, or event, how it may have come about (causes), and what its effects are, have been, or will be. Your thesis should focus on arguing an opinion about this specific trend, situation, issue, or event. It should reveal whether you are surprised, disturbed, awakened, pleased, etc. by this specific trend, situation, issue, or event.

While the students enjoyed the ability to choose a topic, the results varied because the length of the paper often restricted the students from moving beyond a superficial look at their topic. Also, the open-endedness of the shape of the final essay and how to approach the research process in a systematic way also contributed to the less than successful results.

The most successful structure of the research essay came in the format of the problem/solution model, which allowed them to examine the past and offer solutions to a problem that speaks to the theme of race and the American Experience. In this essay, they utilize the strategies that we have developed over the course of the other assignments: close reading that allows the acknowledgement of context and the habits of mind that inform the types of questions they ask of their source material. However, after introducing the problem/solution model for structuring the essay and the research process, I began to see the full benefits of asking the students to write on these topics and its relationship to the previous two essays. I present this essay in the following way:

You will develop a research essay by putting multiple voices together (including your own) to investigate a problem that specifically impacts people of color within the United States and offer a persuasive solution. The desired outcome will be a 6-8-page (not including the works cited) documented essay that 1) describes the problem and the specifics of the problem; 2) convinces the reader the problem needs solving; 3) explains the solution or proposed answer; 4) argues that this is the best solution by refuting objection; and 5) evaluates or summarizes your previously stated ideas, along with a call for action.

The problem/solution model gives the students a sense of agency over their topic choices, which allows them to connect it to their personal interests and passions. The students experience the important trajectory of moving from Baldwin to the voices of his sons and daughters, and finally to them harnessing their own voice and experiences to develop their own cultural product. They become creators and bearers of knowledge. During their presentations, many of them are proud of the work that they have done and are eager to share it with their classmates. Choosing a topic requires the student to consider their own disciplines and interests. Since the course’s inception, students have researched the shifts in police department after the murder of Michael Brown and Eric Garner (2014), the documentary photography of Devin Allen in response to the Baltimore Riots (2015), the rise in black maternal death rates, the development of black twitter, the joys of black fashion, contributions of black popular culture, and the afterlives of the formerly imprisoned.  The transdisciplinary nature of American studies affords students the opportunity to explore these types of topics and bringing Baldwin into the writing classroom with the intent of developing the habits of mind associated with American Studies has proven to be useful in developing a new generation of thinkers and writers who see themselves embedded in the culture that we read, study, and research. 

Looking back on the joys I experienced teaching Baldwin in the writing classroom, I also must admit that from a pedagogical development standpoint it was not always easy. Developing customized in-class assignments, finding the correct balance between writing instruction and the analytical methods of American Studies, navigating the threats of political controls on what and how I taught, and looking for appropriate readings was time-consuming. I often questioned if the critical work I was asking the students to do was too complex; I often doubted the viability of some of the assignments after they seemingly failed to do what I wanted them to do to further the students’ research process. I even grew tired of talking about “race” and felt burnt out by the seemingly never-ending repetition of the same tired issues, which led to a complete abandonment of Baldwin and a shift to documentary photography and place as themes for ENC 1102. However, the lessons I learned about the types of thinking we should be asking our students to do and the impact I know that Baldwin had on how they see their world outweighs all of that. I am comforted by the pioneers of critical pedagogy, such as bell hooks, Paul Freire, the educators that Givens documents, and of course Baldwin, who position education as a practice of freedom and the opportunity to equip students with the tools necessary to identify systems of power and liberate their thinking. This form of revolutionary, transdisciplinary pedagogy may seem to be asking a lot of a freshman writing course, but we owe our HBCU students the same type of hope that Baldwin left with after visiting FAMU all those years ago. We owe it to them to help them develop their connecting imaginations and provide alternative black futures for all of us.

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Kajsa K. Henry, is an Assistant Professor in the English and Modern Languages Department at Florida A&M University. Her research and teaching interests center on the relationship between place, memory, and aesthetics in multi-ethnic American and African diasporic literary and cultural productions. Currently, she is working on a monograph tentatively entitled, From What Remains: The Politics of Aesthetic Mourning and the Poetics of Loss in African American Culture after the Civil Rights Movement Era.