This book is a meditation on the profession of teaching from the perspective of a woman whose intellectual identity as teacher and writer is inseparable from her whole life as a woman. Pagano brings the methods and insights of feminist psychoanalytic literary criticism to bear on a reading of her own educational practice in order to reach a transformed understanding of the educational enterprise. She raises serious questions: How are we implicated in what we know? What actions are required by our knowledge? Responses to these questions are given with probing analyses of practice, ethics,...

This book interprets popular American belief and sentiment about cities, suburbs, and small towns in terms of community ideologies. Based on in-depth interviews with residents of American communities, it shows how people construct a sense of identity based on their communities, and how they perceive and explain community problems (e.g., why cities have more crime than their suburban and rural counterparts) in terms of this identity.

Hummon reveals the changing role of place imagery in contemporary society and offers an interpretation of American culture by treating commonplaces of...

A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who confessed the unrelenting anguish of addiction and depression, Anne Sexton (1928-1974) was also a dedicated teacher. In this book, Paula M. Salvio opens up Sexton's classroom, uncovering a teacher who willfully demonstrated that the personal could also be plural. Looking at how Sexton framed and used the personal in teaching and learning, Salvio considers the extent to which our histories--both personal and social--exert their influence on teaching. In doing so, she situates the teaching life of Anne Sexton at the center of some of the key problems and...