Class in the classroom.

Since its inception, Radical Teacher has made class, and its intersections with culture and education, a primary concern. In particular, the magazine has been an important forum for working-class studies. A 1979 issue of RT, for instance, included an essay on miners' poetry, a Marxist survey of American fiction, and a groundbreaking essay by Paul Lauter which argued that attention to working-class women's writing demands not only the expansion of the established canon, but a radical reconsideration of traditional definitions of literature and aesthetics. In a 1996 issue of the magazine, editor Constance Coiner warned that both cultural studies and multiculturalism frequently neglect class and working-class culture. Suggesting that working-class literature may represent the canon wars' "last taboo," Coiner contended that "multicultural education reform will defeat its egalitarian purpose if gender and racial identities are allowed to suppress class identities" (4, 2). Including articles on working-class women's writing, on a course in working-class culture, and on the intersection of ethnic and working-class literature, among other topics, the 1996 issue provided progressive educators with new ways to theorize working-class identity and expression as well as innovative strategies for teaching about working-class culture.

In drafting our call for this issue, we framed questions about class and education that we hoped would extend the work of prior issues of the magazine, while also addressing some new questions that reflect the present historical, intellectual and pedagogical contexts that radical teachers face. We wanted both to continue the magazine's long-standing commitment to working-class studies and to strike out in some new directions. In particular, we wanted to address two recent developments that have altered the context in which radical teachers think about class. The first is the growth of an increasingly multinational, technology- and information- based corporate economy, what geographer David Harvey refers to as a "regime of flexible accumulation" (147). Over the past decades, and with quickening pace more recently, globalization has reshaped working-class experience, and the dynamics of class more generally. On the one hand, members of the traditional working classes have seen industrial jobs displaced to low-wage areas in the American South and to South America and Asia, in a process that Stanley Aronowitz describes as the "deterritorialization of production" (60). At the same time, capital has proletarianized large sectors of the professional and managerial middle-classes (some of whom have sought to unionize in response), eroding if not eliminating the sense of autonomy and security that has defined PMC labor throughout the twentieth century. Overall, labor in all sectors of the economy has become increasingly contingent and provisional, as corporations have casualized, outsourced and downsized jobs, undercutting the working-class social wage that prevailed in the United States for much of the postwar era.

The impact of these wide-scale shifts in economic arrangements on the dynamics and meaning of class in the United States has been complex and contradictory. While these new patterns of production have reshaped the industrial shop-floor basis of traditional working-class labor, thereby calling into question conventional models of class formation and identity, the widespread decline in job security and stability has also laid the groundwork for a potential rise in class discourse. As Stanley Aronowitz suggests, "If the factory can close at any time, Wall Street banking firms can shed employees in the midst of a stock market boom, and a majority of employees of 'new economy' information companies lack basic health and pension benefits and are often hired as ... contingent workers, it may simply be a matter of time before class rhetoric, if not class analysis, returns to the public stage" (37).

These changes in the economic infrastructure raise important questions that must be met with new forms of analysis and critique. In late capitalist America, the meaning and significance of class can be neither denied nor taken for granted. How do we theorize class identity and class relations in an increasingly globalized, flexible, information economy; in which industrial patterns of class formation are no longer dominant? How has the new economy affected the educational institutions in which we teach and the lives of our students? How do these new economic and cultural conditions alter the way in which we teach, not only about class, but to working-class and more privileged students?

The second development that has altered the context in which radical teachers confront questions of class and education is the rise of and controversy over identity politics and multiculturalism. Working-class studies and class analysis have always fit uneasily into a multicultural framework. As the comments by Constance Coiner that I quoted above suggest, multiculturalism's focus on individual identity and social recognition have accommodated race and gender more easily than class, which has typically been neglected, even suppressed, by multicultural curricula. Indeed, as Vivian Adair and Sandra Dahlberg contend in their essay in this issue, questions of class frequently confound the analytic and pedagogical frameworks used in multicultural classrooms. Moreover, when class is included in a multicultural frame, it is often defined reductively as a static concept, a stable and discrete category of identity; rather than as a broad-based cultural formation that cuts across and intersects a range of social positions. In such a scenario, class is seen as something that only applies to poor and working-class persons, a brand of thinking that is equivalent to the notion that "gender" applies only to women, or that "race" applies only to racial "minorities." Justas many scholars have argued that gender and race mark all social identities (including the identities of persons in positions of social dominance: men and whites), so we need to conceive of class as a process that shapes the lives of all members of society; albeit in quite different ways.

However, the move beyond an identity-politics-based conception of class raises potential problems. In particular, the desire to shift attention from individual experience as the primary site and focus of critical analysis can lead to an overly abstract and de-materialized conception of class. While it makes sense to challenge the reductive, individualistic notions of cultural "authenticity" that often ground identity politics, it is also important to retain a strongly materialist notion of class--to acknowledge the "thingness" of class identities, their grounding in the "hard facts" of everyday life. Class, as cultural historian George Lipsitz argues, "represents both an ideological perception and a historical experience" (12). To comprehend the multi-faceted nature of social class, we need an understanding of it that avoids both the essentialism common to identity politics and the purely "discursive" understanding of class promoted by various "post-Marxist" theories. Class needs to be approached both as a core category of personal identity and as a system of social relations that structures all forms of cultural discourse, knowledge, and experience.

The tension between class as a form of subjective experience and as a larger institutional force is one issue taken up by Erin Smith and Lawrence Hanley in their dialogue about the place of "experience" in the study and teaching of working-class culture. Can we take "experience" as the bedrock upon which we make sense of class identity? In their dialogue, Smith and Hanley suggest that experience can be the starting, but not the end point, of class analysis and pedagogy. As Smith contends, the everyday lives and personal histories of students can serve as a powerful point of entry into a critical discussion of social and cultural politics. However, she maintains that progressive educators should aim to move beyond solely experiential-based forms of knowledge and inquiry. The goal, she asserts, is to help students understand how their individual lives are shaped by (and likewise shape) larger institutional structures of language, history, and social relations. As Smith's article makes clear, however, this is no easy task.

The essays in this issue illustrate innovative ways that class can be approached in the classroom so as to complicate one-dimensional modes of understanding. For instance, while the study of class has traditionally focused on working-class culture and on class oppression, the additional exploration of class privilege and class dominance might allow us to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of social struggle and class formation. Shouldn't working-class studies be complemented by what might be called "critical ruling-class studies," an analysis of the forms and functions of class privilege? In his essay in this issue, Richard Ohmann considers the challenges of teaching about class power to privileged students. Ohmann describes his efforts to raise class "consciousness" among his largely middle- and upper-class students, encouraging them to examine how their assumptions about America's classlessness are, paradoxically; a product of their class privilege. Ohmann's essay suggests that, by challenging students to see that their most deeply held beliefs about personal life are in fact conditioned by class, it might be possible to help them understand the ways in which class, as a category of identity, shapes the entire cultural field, from bottom to top.

Articles in this issue by Ed Wiltse and Erik Jacobson underscore the ways in which class inflects both gender and language. In his essay on teaching Howards End, Wiltse describes his efforts to pierce his students' initial reluctance to grapple with the class dimensions of the novel by using an analysis of gender dynamics, which his students found much more familiar than class, to foster their critical reading skills. By then examining points in the novel where gender and class tensions converge, his students were able not only to see class as a crucial axis of literary meaning, but also to understand it as an inherently dynamic category that comes to have meaning in combination with other forms of cultural discourse and identity. Erik Jacobson's article on critical sociolinguistics describes his experience teaching Haitian immigrants about the ways in which class and language intersect. By focusing on the way language use reinforces structures of class power and inequality, Jacobson helps his students both to re-think the widely assumed "neutrality" of language and to critically assess the class structures of both Haiti and the United States, and the way in which those class structures come to have meaning in everyday speech.

Collectively, the essays in this issue of RT suggest that class, and the study of class, are ripe with tensions: between an emphasis on the "experiential" and the systemic dimensions of class; between a focus on class oppression and a focus on class privilege; between the recognition of class as a category unto itself and as a category that takes on meaning in conjunction with other axes of cultural identity and difference. Our challenge is to see these tensions as productive ones that can facilitate rather than disable radical cultural study and teaching. We hope that this issue offers some helpful strategies for such work, and that class will continue to be an object of study and a source of activism for progressive educators.

WORKS CITED:

Aronowitz, Stanley. How Class Works. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Coiner, Constance. "Introduction." Radical Teacher 46 (1996): 2-4.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1990.

Lauter, Paul. "Working-Class Women's Literature: An Introduction to Study." Radical Teacher, 15 (1979): 16-26.

Lipsitz, George. Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

JOSEPH ENTIN is an Assistant Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and is a member of the Radical Teacher board. He is completing a book manuscript entitled, "Sensational Modernism: Disfigured Bodies and Aesthetic Astonishment in American Culture."

LAWRENCE HANLEY teaches at the City College of New York and edits Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors.