I love the subject I study, that I have been teaching for some twenty years at this campus. I find African-American literature to be especially intellectually productive: African-Americans have created a literature that challenges the exclusivity of Western aesthetic norms even as they have developed an aesthetic of their own. I find African-American literature to be beautiful, vital, because of the originality of the many forms grounded in that aesthetic, a blending of apparently disparate elements from Africa, the West, and the "New World." I try to approximate these qualities in my pedagogic practice. African-American creative writers craft their personal expression, critiquing and celebrating their collective developing culture within the context of American racism by engaging readers in their own thinking and feeling process.

There exists a body of thought—not simply political contemporary expediency—that comprises African-American history, literature and culture. I try to communicate as much as I know about this body of thought and to illuminate the contexts within which these writings have developed. Passing on my scholarship to my students so that they know there is this body of thought is one major basis for my teaching practice.

As important, I want my students to experience African-American forms in the way I teach my classes. So I go to writers and other artists from that tradition to discover models as to how to teach. Since learning in that tradition is often communal, stylistically riveting, I spend much time organizing my classes to be compelling as well as informative and to elicit student discussion. In immersing themselves in a literary culture that embodies the philosophical orientations of a people, students are sometimes able to find points of connection and to articulate points of differences central to their own ways of valuing the world. Such knowledge can be exciting and enriching rather than threatening, which I see as one of the reasons for teaching literature, especially African-American literature.

Since language is the medium of creativity I am teaching, I pay much attention to the writing of students. Some of my students' papers, for example, about their oldest maternal ancestor, have grown into scholarly studies. And in writing short stories, for example, students learn how complex is the process of "creative" writing and thus how to better approach their own written analyses of literary texts.

For me, the classroom is not the only site of teaching and learning. I try to share with students what I do outside the classroom: the joys and difficulties of doing research, the papers I write, the institution-building necessary to the preservation and development of this field. Much of African-Americans' literary practice occurs outside of the academy. Students who want to be involved in African-American literature need to learn not only about critical texts in the academy but also about that other geography. My hope is that in relating that world to the academy, students come to see that the academy, like literary practice, is both in the world and of it and that their study of African-American writings matters, whatever occupation in life they decide to pursue.