Our orders are delivered strictly on time without delay
Our orders are delivered strictly on time without delay
Literature relies on recurring themes which are universal to diverse populations, including love, life, death, good versus evil, coming of age, and many more. Think about a favorite book and consider its use with diverse learners.
Use the questions to guide an original response:
How would you make this text more culturally relevant?
What challenges exist for procuring more diverse texts?
My favorite book for teaching universal themes is Toni Morrison's Beloved. It's a challenging but deeply rewarding text that uses the unique horror of American chattel slavery to explore universal themes of motherhood, memory, trauma, and identity.
While Beloved is centered on the Black American experience, its power in a diverse classroom lies in using its specific historical and cultural context as a gateway to broader discussions relevant to all students. The goal isn't to change the text, but to bridge its context to the students' diverse lived experiences and cultures 🌍.
| Strategy | Cultural Relevance Bridge |
|---|---|
| Comparative Trauma Studies | Instead of focusing only on the historical context of slavery, compare the generational trauma experienced by the characters (e.g., the "sixty million and more") to other historical or cultural traumas. This includes Holocaust survivor narratives, the effects of colonialism on Indigenous populations (e.g., Canadian Residential Schools, Australian Stolen Generations), or the trauma of refugee/immigrant displacement. This validates diverse historical and ethnic experiences. |
| Global Concepts of "Home" and "Belonging" | Beloved explores how slavery destroys the concept of "home" and makes identity fluid and conditional. Use this to prompt students from different backgrounds to share their own cultural understandings of family loyalty, ancestral place, and the struggle for belonging in a new country or community. This is especially relevant to immigrant or diasporic students. |
The primary challenges in selecting and obtaining a diverse array of literary texts for a classroom or curriculum are multifaceted, spanning budgetary, curricular, and structural issues:
"The Canon": Most established curricula and required reading lists are heavily dominated by the traditional Western literary canon (often white, male, European/American). Changing these lists is a slow, bureaucratic process that requires approval from multiple levels, including departments, schools, and even state or provincial boards.
Lack of Teacher Training: Many veteran teachers were trained exclusively on the traditional canon and lack the pedagogical confidence or foundational knowledge necessary to teach texts by authors from marginalized or non-Western backgrounds effectively.
Cost and Volume: Schools often procure texts in bulk to save money. Replacing a core novel with a new diverse text means retiring hundreds of copies of the old book and funding a new, massive purchase, which is often financially prohibitive for cash-strapped schools.
Limited Availability of Classroom Sets: While many excellent diverse titles exist, they may not be available from publishers in affordable, durable, mass-market editions suitable for classroom sets of 30+ copies, making them hard to physically procure.
Controversial Themes: Diverse texts often address themes of race, gender identity, sexuality, and systemic oppression that can be perceived as "political" or "controversial." This frequently leads to censorious challenges from parents or political groups, forcing schools to be highly cautious or revert to "safer," less challenging canonical works to avoid confrontation.
Lack of Parental Familiarity: Parents may be unfamiliar with newer, diverse texts and therefore hesitant to support them, especially if they perceive them as detracting from the literature they grew up with.