Teaching James Baldwin

A few thoughts, so far:

I'm using James Baldwin's Essays collection, which looks like this:



I chose this mammoth volume for a couple of reasons. First, I didn't think it was enough to read one of Baldwin's short collections of essays (Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, or The Fire Next Time, and am pretty sure one of those volumes doesn't reach the IB minimum requirements for non-fiction. Secondly, even though we're not reading the entire 600+ pages of essays, I figured students might have to read some of Baldwin's work later in their academic lives, and now they have a volume that contains nearly all of Baldwin's essays. The total cost ($18) of the collection is pricey, but not as much as buying two of the aforementioned essay collections would have been, so I thought it work well.

And, so far, it has. My unit plan was heavily weighted towards essays in the three aforementioned collections, and students seem to be connecting well. It has gotten better as it has gone, and I'm happy with the selection. Baldwin's techniques are really clear, even if his ideas are sometimes too dense for these seniors.

Teaching non-fiction is somewhat tough. How much contextualization is needed? If we're reading work from throughout Baldwin's career, is it important for students to know that he wrote this particular essay in 1955, kind of at the cusp of the Civil Rights movement, and then this one in 1963, when it was in full swing? Should students know some of the key Civil Rights activities occurring when Baldwin is writing the essays? How much do they need to know? At what point is concentrating on that rather than Baldwin's techniques and what he is saying doing a disservice to the collection? I'm finding myself up in the air about these issues, and still a bit uncertain.

I'm definitely going to teach the work again next year, but need to do a better job of teaching the students how to read essays. For example, I'm finding that they often miss key things, like that it's really important to identify the conclusion that Baldwin comes up with by the end, and to re-read the introduction and conclusion to see how he arrived at the conclusion. I've also developed some handouts throughout the course of the unit that would have been better earlier, so next year I will be able to utilize those earlier in the unit.

I'll be formulating other reflections as I go and posting them here.