Module 5 Unit 5 Activity 2: Teaching Multicultural Perspectives
A Homogeneous Class
I'm accustomed to teaching multicultural views in a class, and guiding discussions so that students are free to share their own cultural experiences, to give a voice to students from minority or less-heard groups. In my teaching experience, there's usually a main cultural norm (generally white, Euro-American), and a plethora of other norms competing with and coming to conflict with it. A good deal of my background as a literature teacher has therefore been to bring light to these conflicts, to help students become open-minded and experience each other's cultures, and to resolve differences amicably, respectfully, and with open-mindedness.
This shows itself in the books I choose, where I try to choose novels written from Asian, African, Native cultures, rather than the usual classics. It shows itself in the lengthy efforts I take to prime students with background understanding prior to reading books. I often ask students to share what their cultural perspectives on things that they've read or heard in class.
However, in my current school, the nature of the demographic I am teaching, as well as the nature of the country I am in, has forced me to shift gears.
Instead of a multicultural classroom full of different races and ethnicities, I have one race/ethnicity: Taiwanese.
Instead of teaching the main cultural norm, I teach using English, a language that is not their mother tongue, and therefore challenges them by default.
Instead of students who are accustomed to my usual classroom norms, I have to prep and train my students to adjust to non-Taiwanese classroom norms, which is not lecture, whole-class based, but discussion, group, and project-based.
Taiwan is an isolated country, and surprisingly monocultural. My students do not have any background knowledge on western norms except from what they occasionally see on TV. Ironically, this means that all the pieces of literature I've avoided teaching in my previous schools are works that I need to teach them here, as they are wholly ignorant of any other culture than their own. There's a natural judgment that comes from that confrontation with the unknown. They have never experienced it, therefore it is "strange" or "weird". My job as a teacher is to gently question that knee-jerk reaction, to get them to start questioning why they night do so.
I therefore need to set up my lessons so that students begin not just recognizing differences, because those differences are obvious to them. And I cannot assume that the students know about different ones either, because their daily interactions will not expose them to it. It is up to me, as the teacher, to provide a classroom as rich in multicultural perspectives as possible, as their non-school environment does not have it.
Choosing Literature
I chose The Giver because, aside from it being a wonderful book that students love reading, the setting of the book takes place in a community that appears culturally "neutral" (though the default names, being generally western, still reveals a western bias). Identifying and judging cultural norms and differences is therefore a safe activity, one where the students will feel safer experimenting. I could not do the same thing, for instance, with a book that takes place within say, an African American family. While the students would have no trouble judging, that type of judgment would be uncomfortable for me as a teacher to witness, and my efforts to correct them may come out harsher than necessary, which would be detrimental to their learning.
Using a "safe" object with which to practice comparing and contrasting cultural perspectives and norms makes it easier for the students and for myself as well. Only when I judge the students to have become accustomed to considering other perspectives would I slowly help them to do so with other cultures where this could become a sensitive issue.
Assessing Student Multicultural Understanding
What I need to start doing is to challenge student assumptions that there is one way to view something. Exposing them to different perspectives is a beginning, but from there I wish to train students to assume that there is always more than one way to view something, and not they might not necessarily be wrong. I will be doing that in that in the following ways:
I'm accustomed to teaching multicultural views in a class, and guiding discussions so that students are free to share their own cultural experiences, to give a voice to students from minority or less-heard groups. In my teaching experience, there's usually a main cultural norm (generally white, Euro-American), and a plethora of other norms competing with and coming to conflict with it. A good deal of my background as a literature teacher has therefore been to bring light to these conflicts, to help students become open-minded and experience each other's cultures, and to resolve differences amicably, respectfully, and with open-mindedness.
This shows itself in the books I choose, where I try to choose novels written from Asian, African, Native cultures, rather than the usual classics. It shows itself in the lengthy efforts I take to prime students with background understanding prior to reading books. I often ask students to share what their cultural perspectives on things that they've read or heard in class.
However, in my current school, the nature of the demographic I am teaching, as well as the nature of the country I am in, has forced me to shift gears.
Instead of a multicultural classroom full of different races and ethnicities, I have one race/ethnicity: Taiwanese.
Instead of teaching the main cultural norm, I teach using English, a language that is not their mother tongue, and therefore challenges them by default.
Instead of students who are accustomed to my usual classroom norms, I have to prep and train my students to adjust to non-Taiwanese classroom norms, which is not lecture, whole-class based, but discussion, group, and project-based.
Taiwan is an isolated country, and surprisingly monocultural. My students do not have any background knowledge on western norms except from what they occasionally see on TV. Ironically, this means that all the pieces of literature I've avoided teaching in my previous schools are works that I need to teach them here, as they are wholly ignorant of any other culture than their own. There's a natural judgment that comes from that confrontation with the unknown. They have never experienced it, therefore it is "strange" or "weird". My job as a teacher is to gently question that knee-jerk reaction, to get them to start questioning why they night do so.
I therefore need to set up my lessons so that students begin not just recognizing differences, because those differences are obvious to them. And I cannot assume that the students know about different ones either, because their daily interactions will not expose them to it. It is up to me, as the teacher, to provide a classroom as rich in multicultural perspectives as possible, as their non-school environment does not have it.
Choosing Literature
I chose The Giver because, aside from it being a wonderful book that students love reading, the setting of the book takes place in a community that appears culturally "neutral" (though the default names, being generally western, still reveals a western bias). Identifying and judging cultural norms and differences is therefore a safe activity, one where the students will feel safer experimenting. I could not do the same thing, for instance, with a book that takes place within say, an African American family. While the students would have no trouble judging, that type of judgment would be uncomfortable for me as a teacher to witness, and my efforts to correct them may come out harsher than necessary, which would be detrimental to their learning.
Using a "safe" object with which to practice comparing and contrasting cultural perspectives and norms makes it easier for the students and for myself as well. Only when I judge the students to have become accustomed to considering other perspectives would I slowly help them to do so with other cultures where this could become a sensitive issue.
Assessing Student Multicultural Understanding
What I need to start doing is to challenge student assumptions that there is one way to view something. Exposing them to different perspectives is a beginning, but from there I wish to train students to assume that there is always more than one way to view something, and not they might not necessarily be wrong. I will be doing that in that in the following ways:
- Monitoring student discussions and responses
- Looking over student written reflections on topics that address multicultural perspectives
- Student performance in activities that require identifying more than one possible perspective: this could be during individual student-teacher conferences
- Focusing on the similarities, rather than the differences when comparing different cultures. This forces the students to think critically about their own culture as well, which they would have less exposure to
- Showing students how the same textual evidence can be interpreted in opposite, yet valid ways. This includes showing them example essays where two people argue for different sides of an issue. Reflection pieces on this, especially which side (or perhaps, a third side) they prefer would also be another form of assessment
Conclusion
As a literature teacher, my job is to teach stories, and stories are a powerful way to meet strangers and see them as people, without the students ever having to leave their classrooms. Stories are an intimate way of knowing, rather than factual, which allows for some distance. It is one thing to look at statistics of dead, fleeing Syrians, but hearing the story of one Syrian child's escape from war is far more powerful and leaves a bigger mark. I will therefore be striving to expose these stories to my students. It is these hidden stories, as the great writer Chimamanda Adichie said, that will teach compassion and understanding.
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