Question/Answer—Long Version

All Together Now Assistant professor Reginald Wilburn—who sings the national anthem at graduation—challenges students to develop their own voices. By Rebecca Rule '76, '79G

Reginald Wilburn, assistant professor of English

Q: What lies at the heart of your teaching?

A: I want to help students affirm the power of their critical voices. It's the opposite of the banking concept of teaching in which the teacher has all the information and fills up the empty vessels. We each come to an idea with experience and perspective. I want my students to move beyond being intimidated by authority, to be able to disagree without being disagreeable.

Q: To find and use their voices?

A: This is frightening for a majority of my students. They may have come out of classrooms where Romeo and Juliet meant only what the teacher said it meant. Fast forward to college and I'm saying: Immerse yourself. Take this opportunity to think innovatively, originally. Formulate your own ideas based on your unique experiences, your spiritual leanings. It takes a lot of coaching, patience, and frustration. I tell them, "I know it's frustrating for you. It's equally frustrating for me." My classes rely on the Socratic method. Getting everyone's input allows us all to rise. I tell my students to privilege what you bring to the table.

Q: Recognize it. Value it.

A: Once you know who you are, there's nothing anybody can say that can dismantle that. Put me in an engineering class and my students would be way ahead of me. If you know about psychology, look at a text from a psychological angle. What do you bring to the table?

Q: A writer friend of mine tells her students, We're all on the same road. Some of us are just a little farther along.

A: Even our placement on the road—how we got to the road—matters.

Q: How did you come to be on this road?

A: Being an African-American male has a lot to do with it. I experienced very little of what my mom and her siblings and parents experienced under the sharecropping system in North Carolina. But I heard the stories. The work was tediously brutal. The cotton they picked was vital for the family's income -- and they had to do this work prior to going to school. My mom and her siblings had to walk several miles to school and were taught with secondhand textbooks from the local white school. The value I hold for education and my passion for teaching are significantly impacted by my family's educational experiences under the Jim Crow South.

Q: And your own education?

A: I studied with many professors educated in white institutions. I studied with Dr. Andress Taylor and am mindful of his experiences in graduate school, having to construct his education in isolation of his white peers and professors even though he was formally accepted and admitted to the University of Pennsylvania at a tumultuous period in 20th-century American history. He had to sit in the hallways during graduate seminars. He was allowed only to listen to his professors' lectures and his peers' intellectual contributions. He could not contribute. He wasn't allowed in the classroom. In my mind, such an experience means he could only take notes on what he heard and weigh those precepts and concepts against his own intellectual hypotheses without the benefit of formally testing them with members of his academic community. Thus, it seems to me that Dr. Taylor was compelled to construct his own education.

Q: How did administrators explain that to him?

A: At that time at the University of the District of Columbia [the early '60s] nobody had to explain it. He learned the experience of exclusion. And yet he succeeded. I bring this experience to my teaching, because we teach as we learn. I am a product of both these examples in American history, and yet, in a very ironic way, it has given me some sort of intellectual and cultural advantage. Because I recognize the ironic value that these experiences have given me, it seems quite natural that this cultural legacy would find its way into every fiber of my being, my pedagogy especially.

Q: What's it like to teach African-American literature at a primarily white institution?

A: At times it's difficult because I feel like I am fighting so much. Not all of it is the course material. Some of it is beyond my control, like being a black male in a position of authority. For my female students it's an issue of gender compounded by my racial identity. Then, of course, the nature of race. And a third component is the rigid scholastics I provide.

Q: You're tough.

A: I'm tough. I see myself as providing a premium education. That comes at a price. What intellectual price are you willing to pay? It can't be simply showing up to class and sitting down. Or writing a paper the night before. Most of the subject matter I teach deals with the very things that make us uncomfortable. Which ultimately come back to me as a black male authority: You mean you're going to ask me to talk about race, to talk about slavery, injustice, homophobia, sexism. These are some of my most private thoughts that I've never articulated except with my most intimate friends or family, and now I'm to put myself on display in public and most importantly in front of you, who will ultimately award me a grade. Students don't want to be considered racist.

Q: Who does?

A: I think it means even more to them that I don't think of them as racist. Last fall in my Survey of African American Literature, I thought we had done this wonderful job of creating a safe space, students understanding that this is an opportunity for us to learn: I do not see any of you as racist. Yes, we can make racially insensitive comments, but that can be a learning experience. I thought we had ironed all that out. But at mid semester I happened to ask a question of a student who tended to be silent. Something about the way he answered, a tentative response, made me follow up with, "How do you feel about your answer?" It was a level of discomfort that he went on to talk about. He'd never had to discuss these questions openly. It made him feel inadequate, scared, intimidated. He thinks he's a good person, but he doesn't want to be seen as racist. I recognized a teaching moment. I believe in calling stuff out and dealing with stuff up front. I thanked him and said, "Hold on to that thought." I looked around the class: "Can anyone else identify with his feelings? Raise your hand." Six or seven hands went up. I said stop. I went back to the student and said, "Do you see this?'' He said, "Yes." I said stop. I said to the other students, "Did you all hear what he said?"

At that moment we created a common bond. I wanted them to understand they were not the only ones who were feeling this discomfort. You can't affirm your critical voice if you're held in bondage around the subject of race, if when the subject pops up you put your head down or you check out. Ii think there are some people who are banking on the fact that when they raise some stink bomb, you'll just become silent. I want my students to be keenly aware of those dynamics. When people are pushing buttons to silence you, you need to recognize what's going on. Then you can make the decision to speak or remain silent. White people talk about race, Latinos and Latinas talk about race, Native Americans talk about race, African Americans talk about race, but seldom do we talk about it together.

If we talked about it together, I believe we'd be able to walk a mile in each other's shoes, existentially or cognitively. It does nobody any good if I do all my venting among people who look like me, because I stay trapped in that world view.

I tell my students all the time: We have the luxury to sit in this space to talk about these issues. Where else can you have these discussions? You will become leaders based on the strength of these discussions. This becomes navigational and intellectual capital.

Q: The classroom becomes a safe place to explore this dangerous territory?

A: You can go back in your mind's eye when the experience comes again. Oh, I remember this. It wasn't so bad. It was discomforting, but in the end I grew from it. That is the value of the woman's studies class and the ethnic studies class. They don't, or shouldn't, side skirt the uncomfortable issues. Confronting those issues head on produces more responsible and intellectual global citizens.

Q: And isn't that the purpose of higher education?

A: In a perfect world every course would actively teach the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability. But since they don't, that's the value of the women's studies and ethnic studies courses. It's the cutting edge pedagogical platform and learning experience, because it's going to take care of the canon of ideas through the lens of otherness broadly defined.

Q: I've heard great things about your rendition of the national anthem at graduation. You're a singer?

A: In high school I would have loved to have become a singer, but it was not on my radar to have to sing at a bunch of dives in order to be discovered. If it was meant for me to be a music celebrity, they were going to have to find me.

Q: How do people describe your voice?

A: They say they get goose pimples. That makes some sense. There's a level of vocal power that I do tap into. It's kind of weird to hear that—but it tells me my voice is definitely communicating.

Q: What do you like to sing?

A: Traditional gospel. Jazz. I wouldn't call myself a jazz singer, more interpreted standards.

Q: Like?

A: "Our Love Is Here to Stay."

Q: I guess you never sing in class, huh?

A: Of course I do. In my 401 class on the last day they asked me to sing. I sang a Negro spiritual because we had just completed an assignment on Negro spirituals. I'll typically do a Negro spiritual in a course on slavery. Last fall we read James Weldon Johnson's, Lift Up Your Voice and Sing, the national negro anthem, so I sang two of the stanzas. So that's how it finds its way into the classroom. I want to create a course on African American literature as music. I'm sketching it out in my mind—invite some musician friends of mine and create some interesting classroom dynamics around voice and music. ~

Rebecca Rule '76, '79G, is a storyteller, story gatherer and humorist and the author of Live Free and Eat Pie: A Storyteller's Guide to New Hampshire, The Best Revenge and Could Have Been Worse: True Stories, Embellishments and Outright Lies.