Finding 3: Exposing students to a variety of diverse and multicultural literature and texts increases engagement and broadens students' knowledge and understanding of global perspectives.
In both ECI 521: Teaching Literature for Young Adults and ECI 524: Theory and Research in Global Learning, we discussed the importance of allowing students to read and engage in texts with characters who share their identies, as well as broadening students' perspectives and cultural awareness by exposing them to texts with characters and issues that are very diverse from their own experiences.
It has always been very important to me to expose my students to a variety of diverse multicultural texts, but I was not sure how to "get started" with this large endeavor. The course readings and classroom conversations in Teaching Literature for Young Adults were able to provide me with numerous recommendations for multicultural literature to try with students, and our discussions of cosmopolitanism in the books Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Appiah, 2006) and Exploring Culturally Diverse Literature for Children and Adolescents: Learning to Listen in New Ways (Henderson and May, 2005) in my Theory and Research in Global Learning class were able to help me plan meaningful book units that exposed students to a variety of diverse texts and perspectives.
In a more creative assignment in ECI 524, I pretended to be a teacher chronicling a year's worth of her experiences attempting to teach multicultural literature in her classes as a way to become "cosmopolitan". In reality, this journal was loosely based on my own experiences, and I ended up teaching the majority of the texts mentioned in this "journal" during my 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 school years, including:
It has always been very important to me to expose my students to a variety of diverse multicultural texts, but I was not sure how to "get started" with this large endeavor. The course readings and classroom conversations in Teaching Literature for Young Adults were able to provide me with numerous recommendations for multicultural literature to try with students, and our discussions of cosmopolitanism in the books Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Appiah, 2006) and Exploring Culturally Diverse Literature for Children and Adolescents: Learning to Listen in New Ways (Henderson and May, 2005) in my Theory and Research in Global Learning class were able to help me plan meaningful book units that exposed students to a variety of diverse texts and perspectives.
In a more creative assignment in ECI 524, I pretended to be a teacher chronicling a year's worth of her experiences attempting to teach multicultural literature in her classes as a way to become "cosmopolitan". In reality, this journal was loosely based on my own experiences, and I ended up teaching the majority of the texts mentioned in this "journal" during my 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 school years, including:
- "Eleven" short story by Sandra Cisneros
- The House on Mango Street novel by Sandra Cisneros
- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian novel by Sherman Alexie
- Night memoir by Elie Wiesel
- They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan memoir by Deng, Deng, and Ajak
- Under a Red Sky: Memoir of a Childhood in Communist Romania memoir by Leah Haya Molnar