We asked our first year Assistant Instructors how their first month of teaching has gone so far. Check out Taylor Johnson Karahan’s response!
Taylor Johnson Karahan (they/she) is currently a PhD candidate in American Studies. We asked them to share their course title, and to describe their course to us and how it embodies American Studies. Additionally we asked how their first month of teaching is going so far and this is what they had to say!
Course name: Unburied: Ancestral Remains
About: This course is about the ways that collections of ancestral remains and burial grounds, both acknowledged and unacknowledged, demonstrate how the past continuously ruptures the present. Through the lens of the dead, we interrogate how history produces narratives and silences about the people who lived and died before us and how they figure into the stories we tell about ourselves.
Short answer: The first month of teaching has been both exhilarating and exhausting! I have found myself spending twenty hours preparing for class each week, mostly because I enjoy it so much and like drawing connections between different sources and ideas. I have also found that leading students in discussion about the course materials takes a lot energy! I've instituted a regular post-class rest and recovery time. My course embodies AMS at UT because we are using a distinct frame of reference that we encounter in our everyday lives - burials, mourning, memory - in order to interpret the significance given to "our" history. Using unburied ancestral remains, we are thinking about the construction of national narratives about slavery, settler-colonialism, Indian boarding schools, Jim Crow, convict leasing, citizenship, and ideas of national belonging. We are learning about the origins and development of race science, disciplines like anthropology and medical anatomy, and national standards for how we collectively deal with death. In this quintessential American Studies course, students are seeing connections between systems of domination, understanding how power influences the narratives that are told and taught, and recognizing themselves and their ancestors as agents of history.
