Week 11: The Discovery of Competence, Chapter 9 comments

The Discovery of Competence:

Chapter 9: Enriching Competence: Constructing Multicultural Frameworks of Knowledge and Understanding

What is important:

The authors discuss recent debates about the value of a multicultural curriculum that expands the Western canon, and the question of whether students who are educated in multicultural classrooms lack the kinds of knowledge that earlier generations (ostensibly) possessed. 

The authors call into question the view that multiculturalism has weakened curriculum because this argument focuses narrowly on which texts are included and excluded. It also maintains a view that the teacher is the sole purveyor of knowledge to passive students, and texts always remain apart from students' lives and personal concerns. 

The authors present their view of "curriculum as an environment ... that enables students to construct knowledge and in doing so to discover their own competence ... [so that] students and teachers can place themselves inside not outside what is being studied" (166).

Creating a multicultural curriculum means more than simply adding texts by diverse writers to the canon, but getting students to engage with their own traditions and cultures by including stories that speak powerfully to them. It also means getting students to see both particular differences as well as the common humanity between and among diverse cultures.

Students should become co-researchers along with their teachers about multicultural knowledge (169). 

Multicultural curriculum is not fixed, but is continually renegotiated with each set of new participants in a classroom community (170). 

Students "need to be able to see the self and the world -- and to find ways of placing that self in relation to the world" (170). The authors discuss classes they have taught on South Africa and on the American Dream: Myth and Reality, and how multicultural frameworks were established in both contexts. They note that in the South Africa course, not enough explicit connection was made between exploring the self and the world, so that students did not explore their role as writers in relation to the content (174). These components of the self and family and the larger world ideally need to be integrated, so that students learn to tell their own stories and explain where they stand in relation to the texts and cultures they are studying (180).

The authors discuss how classes with students from mainstream cultural backgrounds, who have not experienced cultural difference, can benefit from a multicultural course. Students can still discover diversity even within a common culture, often by exploring their own cultural roots (176).

For one of the instructors, it is important for a multicultural course to have a multicultural population of students; a personally compelling theme that touches on values across cultures; and the use of materials that immerse the class in a diversity of cultural visions (179).

Like Bartholomae and Petrosky, this approach asks students to become authors alongside the authors they read, and to use sources to support their own original claims (190).

What I agree and disagree with:

I agree with all of the points listed above; I was trained to study literature from a multicultural perspective, so this chapter reiterated many of my own beliefs and approaches.

I wonder how students come to "trust the voice of the self in the very moment of describing the world" (171)? What can instructors do to encourage this, specifically?

How these ideas might inform my own teaching unit:

The connection between self and world can be explored with a graphic organizer I've used in the past called "Text/Self/World," which gets students to establish an "essential question" that they want to explore, and to find connections between the text, the self, and the larger world. I might assign this graphic organizer in my unit in order to emphasize these relationships. 

I like the assignment that asks students to keep observational notebooks in which they record events that reflect the ways in which people are marginalized or left out of the American Dream, based on their personal observations (185). I think this would be a useful assignment for my group's "American Dream" unit.