“What’s research got to do with it? Intersections of academic work and intercultural communication”
Session Organizer: Gerise Herndon
Nebraska Wesleyan University
5000 St. Paul Ave. Lincoln NE 68504
402 465-2347
cgh@nebrwesleyan.edu

Our panel considers the relationship between academic research by English professors and the implementation of that research in the undergraduate classroom.

This paper begins with the question of whether teaching a Cultural Studies course on “Popular Music and the Politics of Race” can effectively re–orient students from considering themselves merely music consumers to thinking of themselves as cultural critics. Students enrolled in the course were overwhelmingly white, rural Midwestern students who considered themselves fans of Hip Hop music. The course asked the students to explore Hip Hop both as African American cultural practice and as a dominant culture’s hegemonic commodification of culture and race. The course began with an examination of “whiteness” as a racial category, then traced the cultural history of Jazz and Blues and their largely white–appropriated offshoots (Rock, Reggae and Punk) and ended with the ascendancy of Hip Hop. Students learned much concerning the cultural and historical context that produced popular 20th century American music, but exactly what did they learn about not only the study, but the cultural practice, of race?

Larry McClain, Associate Professor of English
Spencer Munson, Student Instructor
Nebraska Wesleyan University

Our portion of the panel asks how scholarly research works with (rather than detracts from) classroom teaching. She will apply her research on Caribbean writer Maryse Condé for the volume Emerging Perspectives: A Writer of Her Own to her teaching of Condé’s Windward Heights (a postcolonial revision of Wuthering Heights) in Women Writing Across Cultures, a course that functions both as an upper level English class, a women’s studies class and a “general education” class under the rubric ‘Global Community.’ Specifically, Herndon will explore the extent to which her own scholarly investigations and writing enhance the actual learning that takes place in the classroom, especially in a class that attempts to perform various functions for the university. Student Nicole Green will provide the undergraduate perspective on the relationship between academic research and classroom learning.

Gerise Herndon, Associate Professor of English, and Director, Women’s Studies Program
Nicole Green, English major
Nebraska Wesleyan University

This paper explores the complexities of applying research in East Asian rhetorical history to the development of a cross-cultural undergraduate rhetoric survey, the first semester of which combines the study of classical Graeco-Roman rhetoric with study of classical Chinese and premodern Japanese rhetoric (Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist, etc.). The course answers the calls for cross-cultural rhetorical study from Robert Oliver, Vernon Jensen, Carolyn Matalene, LuMing Mao, George Kennedy, and many others, but its creation prompts questions regarding the potential dangers of distorting, diluting, and /or "domesticating" non-Western cultures; questions similar to those that arose with the expansion of the literary canon, and with the efforts to incorporate culturally inclusive pedagogies in writing classrooms. The teaching of cross-cultural rhetoric also forces the instructor to rethink standards of effective discourse used in evaluating student writing.

Kathy Wolfe, Associate Professor of English
Nebraska Wesleyan University