Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark

admin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

When Septima Clark began teaching in 1919, she quickly learned that good education is very much like community organizing. Both start by identifying pressing needs, involve the affected in formulating solutions, and give them a stake in the final outcome. Freedom's Teacher tells Clark’s story, and while the writing is drily academic, the book is an important reminder that each of us can make a dent in the status quo.

Clark was a teacher’s teacher, a skilled motivator and a driven, hard-working, proponent of human equality and the power of the classroom to encourage and provoke social change. Her personal life was not easy—her husband died young and she was forced to send her son to live with his paternal grandparents—but her ability to shift gears and accept new opportunities, even in late middle age, is inspiring.

Born to working class parents, her first job was on Johns Island, a tiny underdeveloped farm community off the coast of South Carolina. Clark did not go to the island by choice. In fact, the position was the only placement she could find since her native city, Charleston, refused to hire African Americans to teach in the city’s segregated schools. Johns Island, populated by largely illiterate Black farmers, challenged the fledgling educator whose would-be students lived in such intense poverty that they had to work in the fields instead of attending classes.

But what to do? Clark understood that getting islanders to allow their children to study would be difficult so she began going door to door, speaking about the benefits of formal coursework. “At every turn, Charron writes, “success mandated creativity.” It also mandated that Clark get involved in people’s everyday lives, not only learning Gullah, but also helping them write letters, fill out forms, and determine crop prices and proper wages. What’s more, free evening literacy classes for adults—taught by Clark—gave residents the tools to expand their options. Decades later, Clark brought this experience to the civil rights movement, crafting adult literacy classes to activate and empower those who attended.

The few years Clark spent on Johns Island radicalized her, and Charron describes Clark’s increased agitation over the miserable conditions her students had to contend with, including a decrepit, unheated school building, inadequate supplies, and non-existent text books. Protests against racial disparities set her on a course that would last six-plus decades. Furthermore, her quest for justice prompted her to get involved in numerous civic and civil rights groups including the Highlander Folk School, the YWCA, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Citizenship Education Program [CEP].

Women formed the crux of the CEP, teaching unschooled southerners how to pass literacy tests so that they could vote and then discussing everything from racist laws to activist strategies for changing them. Clark was the force behind much of the CEP’s work, toiling behind the scenes but receiving few accolades for her intrepid work.

Unfazed, Clark never lost sight of the big picture, continually condemning government spending on war and the concomitant failure to provide adequate funds “to end joblessness, slum conditions, and to correct educational deprivation in the ghettos.” Similarly, she never lost her faith in movements for world betterment and her cautious optimism—which lasted until her death in 1987—was infectious.

Clark’s example reminds us that change is never linear or free of backlash. While she picked her battles, Clark knew the importance of nonviolent resistance. As she saw it, watching from the sidelines was never an option.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, January 25th 2010

Sexualities Special issue: "Researching and Teaching the Sexually Explicit: Ethics, Methodology and Pedagogy"

admin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Edited by Feona Attwood, I.Q. Hunter

Sage Publications

I am just about to begin teaching a new course in Human Sexuality, so I was excited to review this special issue of Sexualities, the UK-published journal that features new and different voices from sexology, gender studies, and cultural studies. Each of the eight original essays provides teachers, activists and researchers with much-needed breathing space. As Attwood and Hunter point out, “The emergence of ‘porn studies’ in academic institutions has been met with widespread ethical and political opposition, even more so than the study of horror films. Sex media, rather like horror films in fact, are often seen as intrinsically obscene and harmful, effecting real changes in behaviour and attitude, and therefore potentially damaging to researchers and students.” Not so, say the contributors, at least not necessarily so. Porn appears now to be as central to our culture as its study has become prominent to academia.

The collection brings together theorists, educators, and activists from or working in the U.S. (Dennis Waskul), Finland (Susanna Paasonen), Hong Kong (Katrien Jacobs), Australia (Alan McKee, Kath Albury), and the U.K. (Brian McNair, Clarissa Smith, Steve Jones, Sharif Mowlabocus, Feona Attwood, and I.Q. Hunter).

The essays of Waskul, Smith, and McNair will embolden teachers to embrace new media technologies and push the envelope of eroticism in the classroom. Jones and Mowlabocus remind readers that punishing those who enjoy violent depictions of sexuality and/or who sexualize depictions of violence “does not eradicate or significantly hinder the production of such material” but does complicate things for scholars and teachers.

Katrien Jacobs examines the Hong Kong celebrity entertainer Edison Chen, whose DIY pornography made with other Chinese celebrities was inadvertently leaked to the press (darn those computer repairmen!) and led to mass hand-wringing. Paasonen details “something of a porn renaissance” that occurred in late 1990s Finland. Depictions of human sexuality had been regulated since the 1920s until this shift which enabled a wholesale mainstreaming of porn in Finland and other Nordic countries.

Kath Albury trades on her experiences from 2001 to 2003 as the Chief Investigator of the Australian Research Council-funded project, “Understanding Pornography in Australia.” Albury’s first-rate critical reading of porn debates (in this case, in feminist circles) shows that few voices, however radical or conservative, manage to escape the restraints of moralism.

Alan McKee’s “Social Scientists Don’t Say ‘Titwank’” looks at how referees for journals in the humanities and social sciences have responded to his manuscripts about sex. He concludes that “in the humanities there is no longer a problem with the use of vulgar language.” Nevertheless, his essay reveals sharp differences in method, theory, and work-style between practitioners of cultural studies and anthropology. One statement really rankled me: “We surveyed over 1000 consumers of pornography as part of our research. In the correct social science manner, I will now claim this [sic] data as objective.” Other statements in this and other essays, such as “Older respondents had worse attitudes towards women . . . Christians had worse attitudes towards women . . . Those who lived in rural areas had worse attitudes . . .” made me long for the more fine-grained nuances of ethnographic writing about sex, sexuality, and sexual networking. Then again, few ethnographers are doing porn studies or pushing the erotic envelope in the classroom, so readers will find much else of great merit in McKee’s essay and the others.

Given the brevity and accessibility of these eight exciting contributions (not forgetting the six fine book reviews), this newest issue of Sexualities is an especially welcome resource for educators.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., January 18th 2010