The Multicultural Literature as mirror and window stood out to me while reading these two articles. The articles discusses the use of multicultural text in the classroom. It discusses the fact that as teachers are including more multicultural text in their classrooms, majority students are resistant to them as they are more challenging for them to connect with. It also discussed student's uneasiness to discuss diversity within their classrooms. My question leads to multiple questions: What age students were used in these studies? Also, is this not the essence of reading and literature? Reading to escape current reality and gain empathy and perspective through the lens of the characters which we are reading about? Maybe this is not the type of question we are supposed to be asking, however I feel as educators, posing our purpose for reading could lead to less resistance from "majority" students as discussed in the article.
References:
Glazier, J. and Seo, J.-A. (2005) ‘Multicultural Literature and discussion as mirror and window?’, International Reading Association, 48(8). doi:10.1598.
Kiley,
ReplyDeleteYou pose a great question. I would have to agree that the essence of reading any type of literature is to escape current reality to enter some form of another's reality, but also to gain new knowledge, as well as to make connections with oneself and what you are reading. Perhaps we could teach this as an overarching strategy, rather than trying to apply it to one type of literature, which may be more accepting to others, therefore potentially decreasing resistance in students.
Kiley,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your insights to the Glazier & Seo article. I too connected with their analogy of using literature as both a mirror and a window. That particular analogy helped me to reflect more deeply on the purpose of using multicultural literature in our classrooms. I think the questions you posed really align with these ideas. No matter the text, I certainly would want my students to gain empathy and perspective through the experiences of the character. Books are such a gift in this way! I definitely need to do a better job of remembering that. So oten, we get caught up in the day-to-day grind, that we forget what the real goals are.
Kiely-
DeleteI agree with you about setting a purpose for reading any text in a classroom. These purpose statements allow students to reorganize their thoughts and to find the commonalities within those situations and their lives or of other things they have learned about.
I agree that the purpose of some reading is to escape reality, but I think another part of reading literature is being able to think critically about a text and what the author wants us to learn from the next, both fiction and nonfiction. I don't know about you or others in the class, but I feel like, in recent years, students really aren't learning empathy from reading. Some students are, but those are the students that are actively looking for something to learn or connect with in literature. I think students connect with characters, but it does not help them become empathetic people. I believe, especially for middle school which is what I teach, that students learn empathy (or don't) from their life experience.
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