The classroom should be an emancipatory space

in which discussions of academic and non-academic fields are a regular part of the practice of teaching and learning. In my creative writing and literature courses, I attempt to bridge the gap between the work we are reading and the world at large, beyond their lives as students and beyond the university community.  For the creative writing students, there is the hope that they will consider the community they are living in and the hope that my literature students come to see the texts we are reading as functions of the time and space in which they were written. Further, I introduce my students to some of the basic concepts in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, especially cultural and symbolic capital so as to make the argument that the production of literature is not merely based on talent, some mythical muse, but a number of other factors, including hard work, class status, prior experience, and general cultural knowledge. This is all necessarily political, but in a way that encourages the students to see the work they do in courses as something that reverberates into their lives beyond the university. By acknowledging these challenges and not shying away from them, I believe the classroom can be an open and honest tool for preparing students to become adults living in a modern society.