Open Admissions

The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College

Danica Savonick

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781478030614
  9781478026372
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478059639
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Hochschulausbildung

In Open Admissions Danica Savonick traces the largely untold story of the teaching experience of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich at the City University of New York (cuny) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This period, during which cuny guaranteed tuition-free admission to every city high school graduate, was one of the most controversial in US educational history. Analyzing their archival teaching materials—syllabi, lesson plans, and assignments—alongside their published work, Savonick reveals how these renowned writers were also transformative educators who developed creative methods of teaching their students to navigate and change the world. In fact, many of their methods—such as student-led courses, collaborative public projects, and the publication of student writing—anticipated the kinds of student-centered and antiracist pedagogies that have become popular in recent years. In addition to recovering the pedagogical legacy of these writers, Savonick shows how teaching in cuny's free and open classrooms fundamentally altered their writing and, with it, the course of American literature and feminist criticism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface: As Free as Air and Water
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Winds of Possibility
• 1. Toni Cade Bambara’s Community-Controlled and Multimodal Pedagogy
• 2. “ This Class . . . Has Much to Teach America”: June Jordan’s Public and Project-Based Pedagogy
• 3. Of Parallels and Intersections: Adrienne Rich’s Pedagogy of Location
• 4. Sharing the Illumination: Audre Lorde’s Pedagogies of Difference
• Conclusion: An Education Worth Fighting For
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index