Learning Legacies

Reviews / Votes

"Robbins pushes the envelope on the normative uses and perspectives about the Archive, using literal archives of educational practice recorded in counter-narratives from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Educators will find value in using this book to help train emerging teachers to be reflective about their practice and for models of how to use texts, archives, and stories as powerful teaching tools . . . "
-Timothy K. Eatman, Associate Professor of Higher Education, Syracuse University, Faculty Co-director Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life "[Learning Legacies] combines knowledge about teacher training and the history of education in the United States gained from extensive research into many formal archives, numerous site visits, and interviews with educators, archivists and others. Robbins's own autoethnographic reflections also form a crucial and welcome element of her research."
-Sandra A. Zagarell, Donald R. Longman Professor of English at Oberlin College and scholar of American Literature and Culture "I will never have a chance to spend time with the women who attended Spelman College in its very first years, or to visit Hull House right when it was opening, or to meet the Native American students who found ways to survive together as they resisted the boarding schools. But reading Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women's Cross- Cultural Teaching, I felt connected to these remarkable people and to the scholars who have helped preserve and explain their archives. ... This is brilliant work."
-- Legacy -- Renee Bergland, Simmons University * Legacy * "I am invigorated by Robbins's excellent book, Learning Legacies. She makes clear how examples from the past have inspired pedagogical practices aimed at social justice for those who followed. Indeed, what is likely the most important aspect of Robbins's book is her implicit invitation for readers like me to become part of the intercultural learning legacies she showcases in her book."
-- Peitho -- Jessica Enoch * Peitho * "Robbins' greatest contribution in this book is her ability to move analysis beyond a passive stance, showing how archives can teach and inspire collaboration beyond their initial historical moment through the use of reflection. ... I see this book as a resource for any educator looking to incorporate historical voices into discussions on collaboration and social agency. This is not to say that the book promises any guaranteed solutions, but Robbins offers hopeful ground for cultivating a culture of care and empathy in the classroom. Such a movement towards imaginative social possibility is clearly called for in today's political moment."
-- Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society -- Kassia Krzus-Shaw * Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society * "Robbins's idea of the "learning legacy" comes from her decades of public engagement and her research on nineteenth-century women writers' literacy narratives. A learning legacy, in her conception, is a kind of archive left behind by teachers and students as they work through particular pedagogical problems.... If her idea catches on, it could yield endless local iterations as students and teachers turn to their own local archives to examine how educational praxis and power have been envisioned in the past, and how they might be envisioned for the future."
-- Pedagogy -- Siobhan Senier * Pedagogy *