“This Class … Has Much to Teach America”: June Jordan's Public and Project-Based Pedagogy

This chapter shows how, beginning at City College and with the Teachers and Writers Collaborative (and later at Sarah Lawrence, Yale University, SUNY Stony Brook, and the University of California, Berkeley, especially her famous Poetry for the People program), June Jordan developed a public and project-based pedagogy that encouraged students to use what they learned in the service of social change. It focuses, in particular, on Jordan’s and Toni Cade Bambara’s shared practice of publishing student writing. It also considers the products of that pedagogy, including nearly a dozen anthologies of student writing that they edited throughout their careers. Considered alongside their teaching archives, these anthologies demonstrate how classrooms have been central for not only the reception and dissemination of American literature but also its production.