The Importance of Multicultural Literature
"When . . . students neither see nor hear themselves in the texts educators present to them, when their funds of knowledge are barred from the discussion, their approach to the house of literacy will be a hesitant one, a reluctant one"
- René Saldaña Jr. in his article, "Mestizaje: Forging Identity Through Hybridity"
Throughout my college experience, I have comprehensively researched and truly come to understand the importance of incorporating a wide range of "multicultural" literature that allows students to identify with what they are reading, in my future classrooms. Accordingly, this section of my portfolio is devoted to this topic and its imperativeness.
The Importance of Multicultural Literature PowerPoint and Handout
Incorporating various types of multicultural literature can seem understandably daunting to many, if not most educators. Thus, in acknowledging this fact, I worked alongside two of my peers, Adam Woolsey and Katlyn Vuillemot, in constructing an elaborate presentation for our fellow pre-service teachers, founded in scholarly research on the reasons for which integrating multicultural literature into our curriculum is so crucial, the ways in which to distinguish authentic multicultural texts from inauthentic ones, and even possible ways in which to structure courses as a whole around various forms of such literature.In addition to this thorough PowerPoint, we also created an extremely useful, valuable handout in which we compiled a comprehensive list of over 100 engaging young adult novels across the categories of African, African American, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, and Middle Eastern works. Furthermore, within each of these categories, we summarized two particularly compelling novels, while also suggesting reasons for which these texts would be beneficial to take into consideration when formulating future lesson plans. Our ultimate goal in providing our classmates with this information was to hopefully curtail any possible apprehensions they might have had about teaching multicultural literature, as well as to inspire them to enrich their curriculum by incorporating thought-provoking, diverse texts from around the world, such as the ones that we suggested, into their future classrooms. I hope that you too will take the chance to read through them and recognize the potential of such works.
eng_308_importance_of_multicultural_lit_handout.word_doc.doc | |
File Size: | 460 kb |
File Type: | doc |
Reading Library
Below is a link to a reading library, more specifically, a LibraryThing comprised of 25 novels that I have compiled and described in brief but nevertheless thorough summaries. I feel as though each of these books have great potential to introduce students to the types of literature that will expand upon their views on their surrounding communities, on society, and on the world as a whole. I have therefore organized this collection of books around the themes of stereotypes, social injustice, power hierarchies, and trauma in order to drive students to recognize, ponder, discuss, and in turn write about these pertinent issues in the world around them, and relate them back to their own lives, while simultaneously building upon their critical literacies at the same time- something that I firmly believe is an essential aspect of education. In addition, I have also included images of the covers for each of these books for your viewing pleasure :).
LibraryThing
LibraryThing