Sixth BrANCA Reading Group: “The Ignorant Schoolroom”
North Lecture Room
St John’s College, University of Oxford
14 October 2016, 1-5 pm

For our Autumn 2016 Reading Group, BrANCA will address the role and representation of pedagogy in nineteenth-century American literature. The students who arrive at university do so after years of training in what were once called schoolrooms by people who were once known as schoolmasters. This set of readings takes up the question of how and why the nineteenth-century American schoolroom and its attendant schoolmasters reshaped notions of reading, personhood, and the relation of the school to the state, the domestic sphere, and religion. These readings also encourage a historical view of the origins of current humanities pedagogy, from early childhood through tertiary education, at a moment when institutional pressures have incited a defence of said pedagogy at all costs.

Readings:
·  Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991) (Lessons 1-3): http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=3009
·  Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Record of a School (1835): https://archive.org/details/recordofschoolex00peab
·  Patricia Crain, Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America (2016) (Introduction and Ch. 1):  http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15495.html

For more information see: http://www.branca.org.uk/oxford-october-2016.html
Please register your attendance with the convener, Professor Lloyd Pratt, by emailing lloyd.pratt@ell.ox.ac.uk by 1 October 2016.