Teaching the Midwest in an Era of Precarity

Teaching the Midwest in an Era of Precarity Anna Thompson Hajdik (bio) I hit the proverbial jackpot for my geographic preference when I graduated with my PhD in American Studies. I am a native Midwesterner, and I was thrilled when I landed a full-time teaching position in southern Wisconsin, about two and a half hours from my family's farm. With the knowledge that many of my peers ended up far from family or had to cycle through a series of temporary positions before they could settle down, I counted myself lucky to wind up in my home region. My department chair also saw the value in my interdisciplinary background. I was hired to teach First Year Composition in an English Department, but she allowed me free rein to design a composition course that complemented my areas of study and interest. Subsequently, the course morphed into a Midwestern Studies seminar. Through a range of personal milestones, a pandemic, career highs and lows, "Literature, Places, and Identities of the American Midwest" has been my instructional rock—a steady fixture on my course schedule every fall. It remains there because my university, as underfunded as it is, mandates that every first-year student is required to take two semesters of English composition. I teach at a regional public university in the embattled University of Wisconsin system, where the higher education ecosystem has steadily devolved into a political football as declining state support and pronounced rural-urban polarization has had a damaging effect on how average Wisconsinites view the value of a college education.1 A similar degree of polarization has developed across the Upper Midwest, but the animosity between Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Wisconsin has become so astonishing that national media outlets have felt compelled to report on it.2 It is precisely because of these circumstances that I feel teaching students End Page 77 about the Midwest from a range of interdisciplinary approaches has become more important than ever. While I can never predict exactly where each new group of students will be from, experience has taught me that most of them have personal ties to Wisconsin or Illinois. Rather than viewing this as a constraint of homogeneity, the regional identities of my students allow for deep engagement with the university's local history archives. My training in the interdisciplinary methods of American Studies stressed the importance of rigorous primary source analysis, a skill that my fellow Midwestern historians share. It may then come as no surprise to the historians reading this essay that I craft assignments that allow students to examine a wide range of primary sources that help them connect to their past, sometimes in very vivid ways. This past semester, the class examined plat books of their hometowns from a range of time periods. One student's family had resided in the same community for generations, and he was subsequently able to trace his family's ownership of a plot of land back to the mid-nineteenth century. The student excitedly texted his parents upon seeing the historic document, which in turn represented an interesting collision of old and new technologies right there in the library. From plat books and postcards to census records or personal diaries, my students have many opportunities to discover how their hometown histories have shaped and influenced both the contemporary landscapes of their communities and their lives. Because I was hired in an English Department, I was encouraged from the beginning of my career to incorporate the study of literature into my classes. Each semester teaches me something new about what texts resonate with a particular class or, frankly, which texts land with a thud. Willa Cather's My Antonia has remained a fixture on my syllabus because it is an inherently flexible novel with a prose style that is lyrical and engaging. I can pair it with a class field trip to the restored prairie on campus which turns into a vibrant palette of autumn color every fall and provides a welcome escape from the classroom for my students. Or, I can weave in lectures about enduring themes like immigration, gender, ambition, or the nature of the American dream into...