I teach in a school where every class is supposed to teach
from a multicultural perspective.
Sometimes I wonder if we should have spent more time from the beginning
talking about what we mean by multicultural and what we hope to gain from this
type of education. I have noticed things
like “Multicultural Night” at my school, where students bring different types of
food from various countries they have studied, but this seems to be the extent
of how many teachers address learning about other cultures. Since I teach English, it seems a little more
natural for me to teach about foreign places, and other subjects like history
and languages other than English also have that advantage. I’m sure other teachers have other projects
they teach and present in the classroom, but for some reason all I ever get to
see are the same things again and again.
There has to be a better way than food and flags…
I know that most of my literature classes taught the classic
cannon which is predominantly white, male, and most of them are dead. Most of my seniors have a hard time relating
to this literature, but this is still what we teach in high school. Although I understand the importance of
teaching British literature, and understanding the history of the English
language, we spend so much time on the first section of British history, we
rarely get to the portion of British history that deals with England as a conquering
nation. The students do not deal with
the post-colonial side, so if they are from one of the conquered nations this
is problematic.
For years, as English teachers we have taught most texts
from the New-Criticism style of reading a text and this is doing a disservice
to our students. Authors like Deborah
Appleman, in the book Critical Encounters
in High School English, suggests teaching high school students to use multiple
ways of reading a text. Her presentations
on the web includes multiple ideas about using “lenses” to teach students multiple theories to view a
text in order to shape ideology. Tim
Gillespie also has a similar book titled Doing
Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage
with Challenging Texts. Both of these books are easy to use and have helped me and my students understand multicultural texts. The books I mentioned have provided new ways of teaching students to view a text in order to see the subject matter. In this way the students have felt empowered by the literature- exactly in the way the text describes.
Although sometimes teachers, especially English teachers are
resistant to change, the ideas presented in these books help students see there
are new ways of looking at a text. It is
important, as Hytten points out in “The Promise of Cultural Studies of Cultural
Education” that these texts are not limited to the novels I was taught and they
are not limited to novels. Students need
to be exposed to different types of media and given the opportunities to respond
critically to them.
Last semester I took a class about post-colonial literature
and I’m hoping that over the next few semesters I will feel more comfortable
incorporating some of these texts into my curriculum. I currently teach works from all over the
world, all written in translation. This
semester my students are working on orals presentations about setting and the
impact of setting on the characters in the works we’ve read. We’re looking at all aspects of setting: religion, economics, geography…
Any ideas anyone else has for teaching world literature
would be welcomed!
Appleman, D.
(2009). Critical encounters in high school English. New York: National Council
of Teachers of English.
Gillespie, T.
(2010). Doing literary criticism: helping students engage with challenging
texts. United States: Stenhouse Publishers.
Hytten, K. (1998). The promise of cultural studies of
education. Educational Studies, 29(3), 247-65.
Noel, J. (2012).
Classic edition sources: Multicultural education. (Third ed.). Sacramento:
McGraw-Hill/Dushkin.
