It is with pleasure that I bring to the attention of the #teachingmodwomen audience a recent edited collection on—what else?—teaching modernist women’s writing. Although the title of the 2013 Communal Modernisms: Teaching Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture in the Twenty-First Century Classroom does not explicitly mention women writers, nor does it foreground the authors’ and editors’ explicitly feminist take, the introduction and essays make that stance, and its stakes, abundantly clear. The editors Laurel Harris, Emily M. Hinnov, and Lauren Rosenblum make urgent claims for a 
feminist pedagogy put into practice via the teaching of modernist women’s writing in terms of community. By focusing on the ways modernist women engage the idea of community in their texts, we in the classroom can ourselves create a community of teachers and learners, one that might offer the potential for constructive intervention into a higher education climate hostile to the goals of humanities education and characterized by racism, sexism, classism, and prejudice.
Geneviève Brassard, herself a #teachingmodwomen contributor, has reviewed Communal Modernisms for the journal of intermodernist studies The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914–1945; you can read that review here. What I’d like to highlight here about this collection are two points. The first is the clearly discernible influence of the late Jane Marcus. (I wrote about the 2015 MSA seminar dedicated to Marcus’s work here.) One of the contributors, Robin Hackett, is a former student of Marcus’s, and one of the editors, Emily Hinnov, is herself a student of Hackett’s. (Hinnov will also, happily, be contributing to #teachingmodwomen.) Marcus contributed the afterword to Communal Modernisms, in which she lays out the implications for teachers and scholars working in feminist modernist studies. This work is essential because it speaks truth to power, it is a form of much-needed resistance, and its politicization of the pedagogical enterprise is what is required to combat patriarchal and economic repression. For Marcus, the emphasis on community in Hinnov’s, Harris’s, and Rosenblum’s modernisms is a turn the field needs to take in order to respond to pressing public problems.
The second point I’d like to make is: I would love to know how students responded to the texts and teaching strategies described throughout the collection. Each essay concludes with a sample lesson plan, including goals, sequencing of content, and suggested assignments. It describes what the author/instructor has the students do. What seems to be missing is the student voice. (This is a point Brassard makes in her review as well.) What got said during class discussion? What got written about? How were the students themselves part of that community of teaching and learning? One of the suggestions made to several #teachingmodwomen contributors over the course of revising proposals for the prospectus was: give me a window into your classroom. I’m pleased to note that several proposals even include undergraduate co-authors. If a feminist pedagogy involves a decentering of power in the classroom, then maybe that decentering can make more room for the presence of the student, and that can inform how we write about creating communities of teaching and learning.