What We Hold in Common: an Introduction to Working-Class Studies.

Edited by Janet Zandy (Feminist Press, 2001).

At the same time that schools find themselves chastised for turning out students underprepared for the contemporary workplace, educational institutions come under fire as readily for engaging learners in critical dialogue about the realities of working life. A recent example comes to mind: the outcry surrounding the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's selection of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001) as the summer reading selection for their entering undergraduates. This best-selling collection of pieces, originally published in Harper's, chronicles the author's experiences as a journalist working in the tradition of labor's earlier participant-observers, including Margaret Byington's foray into mill life in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Ehrenreich undertakes stints in several low-paying lines of work, such as waitressing and housecleaning, in order to pose a central question of American economic life: how does one make ends meet while working at or around the U.S. minimum wage?

No matter that the UNCH website presenting the summer reading selection explains that the assignment targets critical reading, speaking, and listening skills rather than the book itself; that the program obliges students to only a single, two-hour small group discussion; that the university provides links to a spectrum of reviews of the book (which are by no means all favorable); or that the discussion questions furnished with the assignment specifically direct readers to consider the book's limits and shortcomings ("Are her reports fair? Accurate? Biased? What makes her account credible or questionable in your view? What are the limits of her research or what information did you feel was missing in her account?" (as featured at http://www. unc.edu/srp/questions.html)). It is difficult to say which problem--that such a work gives offense, or that students suppose themselves served educationally only through protection from works that might offend--is the greater impediment to the emerging field of working-class studies. How are we to understand such arch objections to a work itself replete with disclaimers (including Ehrenreich's assertion that "I make no claims for the relevance of my experiences to anyone else's, because there is nothing typical about my story"(9))?

While it has been several years now that educators have spoken to the value --indeed, the urgency--of the pedagogical process Gerald Graft refers to as "teaching the conflicts," teaching/learning about class difference has lagged behind critical approaches to other categories of social analysis, such as gender and race. The 1980s and 1990s marked a time during which teachers in all settings sought to update their curriculum and reconcile classroom practices with the lasting effects of earlier social movements, from civil rights to women's rights. In something of the way, then, that such collections as Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Stepto's Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1979), Paul Lauter's Reconstructing American Literature: Courses, Syllabi, Issues (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1983), Paula Gunn Allen's Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1983), Ellen G. Friedman's Creating an Inclusive College Curriculum: A Teaching Sourcebook from the New Jersey Project (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996), and Bonnie Zimmerman and Toni A. H. McNaron's The New Lesbian Studies: Into the Twenty-First Century (City University of New York: Feminist Press, 1996) invited educators to reflect upon their pedagogy in terms of inclusiveness, diversity, pluralism, and value spectrum, Janet Zandy's What We Hold in Common offers a sourcebook and primer on critical labor studies.

As with other forms of inclusive instruction, working-class studies calls upon students to challenge some of their most deeply-held assumptions (in this instance, about opportunity, wealth, status, labor, upward mobility, success, and, as the book's title hints, the idea of a common good). Because of the persistent and cherished fiction of the United States as a classless society, and along with it the notion of individualism as antidote to economic adversity, students find it difficult--even downright unpatriotic--to confront the realities of inequality, poverty, and class discrimination in America. It is for this very mason, however, that Zandy's book proves such an important resource to teachers wishing to render class visible, and in critical ways, within the classroom. Part work-themed literature anthology, part collection of essays about the field of working-class studies, and part syllabi archive, What We Hold in Common does an admirable job of acquainting readers with the origins of this interdiscipline, arguing for its timeliness and importance, and helping to energize and equip teachers for the difficult task of teaching about class.

Zandy has earned her place as an editor within the field of working-class studies with such prior publications as Calling Home: Working-Class Women's Writings: An Anthology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), and, in partnership with David Shevin, Writing Work: Writers on Working-Class Writing (Huron, Ohio: Bottom Dog Press, 1999). All three volumes were deservedly well-received by scholars and teachers, and have become frequently referenced texts in and beyond labor studies. This latest book, What We Hold in Common, provides a companionable work, consisting of five major sections. The first offers testimonies, often in the form of memoir, from members of the working class. Although there is not much apparatus with these selections, biographical notes at the end of the volume profile each of the authors, most of whom are campus-based writers. Following that is a section devoted to collecting and preserving such accounts through autobiography and oral history. The third and fourth sections reflect on the theory and practice of working-class studies, while the final section--in many respects the most interesting--shares pedagogical materials, both in the form of syllabi and resources lists, for teaching working-class studies. While this section of the book would benefit from more explanatory narrative surrounding each assignment or course design, the items nonetheless form a strong foundation for those seeking informed instructional models within labor studies. Courses with tides ranging from "Poor in America," to "Who Does the Work?: A One-Day Introduction to American Working-Class Literature" portray the instructional possibilities.

Zandy's lucid contributions, both in the introduction and her essay, "Traveling Working Class," demonstrate just what is at stake in such teaching/scholarship, and along the way set out an agenda for future working-class studies: (1) honor, preserve, and communicate the richness and vitality of working class culture; (2) foreground class within conceptualizations of social difference; (3) make work and workers visible within accounts of the nation's history; and (4) counter the forces exerted on citizens by corporate culture, such as the insistence that people "individualize, personalize, and internalize economic loss" (243). This book, like Sherry Lee Linkon's Teaching Working Class (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), addresses itself to an audience of teachers rather than students. For a classroom textbook, one might instead consider assigning excerpts from Paul Lamer and Ann Fitzgerald's excellent anthology, Literature, Class, and Culture: An Anthology (New York: Longman, 2001).

While not suitable as an undergraduate course text, What We Hold in Common affords considerable benefits to students in the classroom, particularly those from working-class backgrounds or wishing to become sensitive to those experiences. Zandy's book makes it more possible for students and teachers alike to analyze the context and implication of a wide range of texts in working-class studies: journalism from Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed to John Bowe et al's Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs at the Turn of the Millenium (New York: Crown Publishers, 2000), films from Barbara Kopple's American Dream (1990) to Michael Moore's The Big One (1998), and historical fiction from Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron-Mills (1861) to Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio(1974).

In his book on liberatory educational practice, Critical Teaching and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Ira Shor contends that, "Behind every alienated face is a compelling story" (270). The thoughtful efforts of educators such as Janet Zandy help ensure that those stories do not vanish or fall silent with their tellers.

FOR FURTHER READING ON WORKING-CLASS STUDIES:

DeMott, Benjamin. Created Equal: Reading and Writing about Class in America. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Dews, C.L. Barney, and Caralyn Leste Law. This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.

Hapke, Laura. Labor's Text: The Worker in American Fiction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Lauter, Paul. "Working-Class Women's Literature: An Introduction to Study," in Women in Print I, eds. Joan E. Hartman and Ellen Messer-Davidow. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992.

Ryan, Jake and Charles Sackrey. Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class. Boston: South End Press, 1984.

Terkel, Studs. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. New York: New Press, 1997.

Tokarczy, Michelle, and Elizabeth A. Fay, eds. Working Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.

Zaniello, Tom. Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Organized Guide to Films About Labor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

LINDA S. WATTS is Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell. Her teaching and research interests include U. S. literature and culture; visual arts; women's studies; multicultural education; HIV/AIDS education; and critical and alternative pedagogy. She is the author of Rapture Untold: Gender, Mysticism, and the 'Moment of Recognition' in Writings by Gertrude Stein (1996) and Gertrude Stein: A Study of the Short Fiction (1999). She is currently at work on an Encyclopedia of American Folklore for Facts on File.