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Kelly Taylor

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ENG 252

12 October 2017

Teaching Multicultural Literature in English Courses: Is it Our Job?

In 2012, my sophomore year of high school, I had the wonderfully self-gratifying

opportunity to register for an Honors English course. I had mentally prepared for a year of

Shakespeare, Twain, Orwell, Tennyson, or whatever other male, Anglo superstars that centuries

of literary studies have presented us. I had studied ACT vocabulary, I had done the summer

reading, and I was ready to be submerged in class after class of Saxonic wisdom. The course in

which I ended up, though, was far different. Our first book of the school year was to be The

Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck. After that, we would study Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart,

followed by our poetry unit, during which we would delve into the works of Michael Ondjaatje

and other (then) unfamiliar writers.

What I gained from this experience could not be gained elsewhere, except by traveling

the world. The class had not been an English class with a side of cultural enlightenment; it had

been, to me, a cultural awareness course taught with English methods. Why is culturally diverse

literature so prevalent in upper-level English courses? Is it the modern English teachers duty to

teach cultural awareness to his/her students?

What is Multicultural Literature?

Carol J. Fuhler, educator and author of Teaching Reading with Multicultural Books Kids

Love, explains that [Multicultural] books offer tales about a broad range of humanity, including

people of color, various religious groups who have been persecuted for their beliefs, and
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individuals with intellectual or physical disabilities (ix). Here is a simple explanation of an

impossibly wide genre, yet an operationally useful one. For the purposes of this research paper,

however, Ive decided to focus on the teaching of ethnically diverse literature; specifically, texts

from authors of ethnically diverse origins, great works translated from other languages into

English, and non-fiction works focused on life in other parts of the world.

The Right to Literacy

Lets approach this question by first examining an increasingly common principle of 21st

century America: Students within the American public school system have the right to literacy.

The Detroit News recently published an article describing the September 2017 class-action

lawsuit, Gary B. v. Snyder, in which prosecutors attempted to sue the state for failure to

adequately fund schools based upon this premise. [Mark] Rosenbaum, who works for the Los

Angeles-based firm Public Counsel, filed what is considered an unprecedented civil lawsuit that

alleges that literacy is a U.S. constitutional right (Chambers 1).

Granting that literacy is a broad termone which, for the purposes of the lawsuit,

seems to be limited to physical access to adequate learning materials and qualified teachers

several proponents of multicultural literature use the same premise in pushing for more diverse

curricula: Students have the right to be culturally literate. By equating literacy with cultural

awareness, educators have taken upon themselves the duty of incorporating culturally diverse

readings into the curriculum.

Literature for Humanity

One would be hard-pressed to find a teacher of literature whose primary focus is

something other than the question, What does this work teach us about humanity? One would

be equally hard-pressed to find a teacher who opposes the idea of cultural awareness. Whats the
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connection? At their best, both literary scholarship and practices in cultural awareness are

ultimately studies in humanity.

In Through Other Eyes: Developing Empathy and Multicultural Perspectives in the

Social Studies, Skolnick, Dulberg, and Maestre introduce what they name the Thinking-Feeling

Spiral, a model for successful pedagogy that engages learners on both emotional and intellectual

levels (14). Through teaching multicultural literature, teachers are able to appeal to the emotions

of their class. Skolnick, Dulberg, and Maestre provide the following example:

The teacher presents the class with a drawing of a child at a loom or a photograph

of a child working in a sweatshop in the nineteenth century. Students are asked to

imagine who this child is and what her life is like (16).

The teacher in this scenario then assigns a similar writing prompt. One of the obvious

goals here is to inspire empathy and defamiliarization while providing an outlet for writing. In

this way, not only has the teacher provided an assignment by which he/she can grade English

proficiency, he/she has also made it clear that cultural awareness is an important element of

humanity that can be explored through classroom assignments.

Making Your Marks

English teachers have the added benefit of subjective appeal. Because the learning

methods and subject matter in English courses are inseparably entwined, we can double-dip,

successfully teaching reading skills and the meaning of a given work simultaneously. Its

impossible to teach poetry without reading poems. We know, therefore, that English has another

dimension to it compared to other subjects. Since we must teach literature by reading literature,

why not choose works that serve a more profound purpose than reaffirming, time and time again,
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those of the dominant culture? Why not strive to go above and beyond in our roles as educators

by teaching English proficiency and cultural norms?

Fuhler says, of the lessons included in her book, One important theory addressed

through these lessons is the generative learning theory . . . The theory suggests that readers need

to actively construct relationships between information in a book and their own background

knowledge (xi). Incorporating multicultural literature into ones teaching isnt just to gain moral

high ground; its a necessary adjustment we, as modern educators, need to make in order to

provide our students with a globalized education. English teachers in particular have the unique

opportunity to teach a second curriculum while focusing on comprehension and deep-reading,

and its up to us to ensure that that second curriculum is meaningful.

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Works Cited

Chambers, Jennifer. "Hearing debates who failed Detroits students." The Detroit News (2017).

Online article.

Fuhler, Carol J. Teaching Reading with Multicultural Books Kids Love. Golden, CO: Fulcrum

Publishing, 2000.

Kamenetz, Anya. "The 'Fundamental Right To Literacy' Debated In Court." nprEd 12 August

2017. Webpage.

Skolnick, Joan, Nancy Dulberg and Thea Maestre. Through Other Eyes: Developing Empathy

and Multicultural Perspectives in the Social Studies. Toronto, Ontario: Pippin Publishing

Corporation, 2004.