Multicultural literature for children and young adults: Reflections on critical issues. How does your role as a reader of critical multicultural literature inform your role as an educator? How does your reading of Return to Sender help you understand the pedagogical possibilities of multicultural literature in your curriculum? Does critical multicultural literature such as this novel have a role in the classroom?Ĭai, M. Particularly, we are interested in discussing how this reading experience may help inform your decisions as educators when it comes to selecting literature for your students in your classroom. Some of those responses, as reflected by one student’s use of an acrostic poem in her Graffiti Board response, are uniquely personal they reveal the how critical multicultural literature, such as Return to Sender, may help craft spaces for critical conversations in the classroom.įor this final week of our digital literature discussion, we focus on the use of multicultural literature in the classroom. In this respect, multicultural literature has the potential to help expand the curriculum and bring a pluralistic perspective, one that is inclusive and democratic versus exclusive and hegemonic.įrom the discussions and responses that we have seen on this month’s WOW Currents, we know that our undergraduate and graduate students from Texas and New York have engaged in a critical discussion of their reading of Return to Sender. Making a distinction between a pedagogical and a literary definition of multicultural literature, Cai (2002) writes that, “the pedagogical definition of multicultural literature is predicated on the goal that this category of literature is supposed to achieve: Creating a multicultural curriculum and implementing multicultural education” (p. In particular, scholars focusing on this issue caution that different definitions of what constitutes multicultural education may impact the ways in which this type of literature is used in the classroom. In the last decade, much has been written about the multiple and contested meanings of multicultural literature. ![]() When it is incorporated into the curriculum, children from these groups find characters with whom to identify in the books they read in school. ![]() Instead, it represents their world, reflecting their images and voices. From the perspective of marginalized ethnic groups this new category of literature is not alien or exotic at all. ![]() Whether multicultural literature is alien or exotic is not inherent in itself, but rather lies in the perception of the reader. Julia Alvarez (2009, Radio interview KUER) Stories, novels, are the truth according to character… you are not talking about the truth universally, you are talking about the particular individual embodiment of different truths. By Andrea García, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, and Carmen Martínez-Roldán, Universtiy of Texas, Austin, TX
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