Let me start by saying that this is my first time teaching at a predominantly white institution. My background includes teaching at a predominantly Latinx urban public school, and as a Latinx myself, my students and I shared understandings about ourselves, the United States, and the world. At my new school, I've learned that my perspective is often new to my students. I see this not as a barrier but as an opportunity to share a global lens and invite my students to explore their own culture and experiences.
In my class, my students and I use literature to explore who we are and how our identities relate to larger issues of race, class, and gender. For most of my students, these are aspects of their identity they have never explored, and it's also the first step in helping them think about what influences their worldviews. Although there are many ways to design literature courses, I believe two strengths of my global-minded approach are how I engineer connections with and through texts and the diversity of voices in our literary conversations.
Text and Topic Pairings
Making connections with and through texts is a common element of most literature courses. I try to be critical, creative, and justice-focused when I design these learning experiences. When selecting a text, I pair it with works that span a range of genres, media, and time periods. Studying one topic across various voices and expressions is an engaging and effective way to fully grasp it. My students explore every text from angles that highlight lesser-known characters, intricate details, or controversial topics. See the table below for an example of text pairings and the corresponding topics explored.
Bringing Marginalized Voices into the Classroom-table
Major Work | Pairing and Supplementary Work | Topics Explored |
|---|---|---|
| American Born Chinese (Gene Luen Yang) | Escape to Gold Mountain: A Graphic History of the Chinese in North America (David H. T. Wong) "Chyna and Me" (JoYin C Shih) Poetry by Chinese Immigrants (two guest readers) | Model minority myth History of Chinese immigration Racism against Asian Americans Anti-immigrant sentiment |
| To Kill a Mockingbird(Harper Lee) | Facing History and Ourselves materials #BlackLivesMatter articles and videos News reports on police murders of unarmed black men | Police brutality Lynching in the United States #BlackLivesMatter movement Gender identity |
| Gabi, a Girl in Pieces(Isabel Quintero) | "Linguistic Terrorism" (Gloria Anzaldúa) Latinoamérica excerpt (Residente) | Culture and language Body image and colorism Latinx identity |
This pairing strategy allows us to dig into the larger issues at play, and the books become opportunities for real-world conversations. My instructional goals go beyond test preparation, essay writing, or literary analysis. I want my students to be productive and empathic contributors to society. I know they will be leaders in various ways, and I want to make sure they are the type of leaders I'd follow.
Whether through video or as invited guests, the voices I share in my classroom bring the texts and subjects we are studying to life in a way no other medium can. Our speakers have either lived what the characters we are reading have lived or can expand our knowledge of the issues in some way. For example, after we finished reading To Kill a Mockingbird, we watched Michael Brown's mother, Lesley McSpadden, speak about her son, the foundations she started in his name, her activism, and the new politicized journey she's taking. McSpadden's voice illuminated our understanding of Tom Robinson, a central figure in To Kill a Mockingbird, whose death intersects with current issues of police violence and the killing of unarmed black men and boys.
The United States has a segregated society, and one way I work on dismantling that is by exposing my students to lives and experiences outside their own. In her popular 2009 TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns that we need multiple perspectives and voices to guard against the stereotypes and misconceptions born of a singular viewpoint. She says, "Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity." Through a variety of voices intersecting across texts, I'm equipping my students with the stories that will prepare them to embrace and engage in a global world.
Resources
Anzaldúa, G. (1995). Linguistic terrorism. In L. Castillo-Speed (Ed.), LATINA: Women's voices from the borderlands (pp. 250–256). New York: Simon & Schuster.
Beach, R., Johnston, A., & Haertling Thein, A. (2015). Identity-focused ELA teaching: A curriculum framework for diverse learners and contexts. New York: Routledge.
elvecindariocalle13. (2011, September 27). Calle 13 – Latinoamérica [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkFJE8ZdeG8
Hamill, P. (2009). Foreword. In I. Stavans (Ed.), Becoming Americans: Four centuries of immigrant writing (pp. xv–xvii). New York: Library of America.
Lee, H. (2010). To kill a mockingbird. New York: Grand Central Publishing.
Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97.
Poetry by Chinese Immigrants. (2000). In I. Stavans (Ed.), Becoming Americans: Four centuries of immigrant writing (pp. 163–165). New York: The Library of America.
Quintero, I. (2014). Gabi, a girl in pieces. El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press.
Rodríguez, R. J. (2017). Enacting adolescent literacies across communities: Latino/a scribes and their rites. Lanham, MD: Lexington.
Shih, J. C. (2013). Chyna and Me. Rereading America: Cultural contexts for critical thinking and writing (9th ed.) (pp. 517–523). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.
Wong, D. H. T. (2012). Escape to gold mountain: A graphic history of the Chinese in North America. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Yang, G. L., & Lark, P. (2006). American born Chinese. New York: Square Fish.