Sunday, February 14, 2010

High School Students Responses to Alternative Value Stances Associated with the Study of Multicultural Literature

This article relates directly to Esperanza Rising because it deals with multicultural texts in the classroom. I think that dealing with multiculturalism through literature can sometimes be difficult because students are not able to see the struggles that the characters face as they cross cultural barriers, but rather they must visualize the conflicts through the reading. I think that sometimes cross-cultural awareness comes easier to students through visual aids, like films. In Esperanza Rising, the use of Spanish language integrated into the text could be a difficult aspect for a young reader to deal with, but I think that the author purposely inflicts this struggle on the reader so that he/she will feel the same outsider-ness as Esperanza. In Anzaldua's works, something that I've been reading for an American Literature course, you see the same use of Spanish language in an English piece for the purpose of oppressing the oppressive society -- the English-speakers deserve to experience the challenges of the Spanish-speakers as they code switch and mingle languages to form "spanglish" and other dialects.

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