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Focusing on More Diverse Reading
This week's news highlights the efforts of the Seattle school system to include a more diverse range of texts in the classroom by adding more contemporary writers, more women and more minorities. The teaching resources below can broaden the readings in your own classroom.
Try the ReadWriteThink lesson Literature as a Catalyst for Social Action: Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges (E) to engage students in critical discussion of complex issues of race, class, and gender. The lesson challenges students to confront the injustice of social barriers that
separate human beings from one another and to examine the role of
prejudice and stereotypes in sustaining these barriers
The ReadWriteThink lesson Promoting Diversity in the Classroom and School Library through Social Action (M) invites students to explore their library for stereotyped representations and then pair these pieces with more diverse resources. Students create promotional bookmarks to place inside the library books, urging other readers to seek more diverse readings.
From
Friedan Forward—Considering a Feminist Perspective (S), from ReadWriteThink, explore
readings that share a feminist perspective and then explore their own position
on similar issues. The lesson plan asks students to write letters to their future
selves, sharing their position on the issues that they have investigated.
The College English article "Why Read Multicultural Literature?
An Arnoldian Perspective" (C) argues that multicultural literature should be
a part of the classroom not because it gives minority students writers in
the curriculum to relate to, nor because it ensures that the diversity of the
world’s population is represented
in the
canon. Instead, the author asserts, we should read multicultural literature because
it’s
good for all of us, good
for us in specifiable and specific ways.
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