Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach

SECTION E: HOW CAN THE SAME TEXT HAVE MULTIPLE

MEANINGS?

Using Multicultural Literature to Understand Self and World

By Judith Y. Singer and Sally Smith

Judith Singer, whom you met in chapter 4, and Sally Smith, another Hofstra colleague, conducted

a series of research projects that illustrate an additional problem with texts that teachers should

be aware of as they prepare instruction. When students read a text, they construct meaning differ-

ently because they come from a variety of cultural contexts with differing sets of assumptions. Judi

and Sally conclude that teachers cannot simply rely on texts, even interesting texts, to promote

student understanding of complex issues, but must direct student attention and challenge precon-

ceptions. In this essay, they suggest some ways that this can be done. Although they write about

teacher education students, their ideas are applicable in any classroom.—Alan Singer

We are teacher educators who use multicultural children’s literature to help teachers better

understand themselves and the world. For us, multiculturalism is a form of both critical and

cultural literacy. Multicultural literature has the potential to challenge biases about diversi-

ties like race and sexual orientation. It can also affirm the lives of marginalized readers. How-

ever, these experiences are never guaranteed. Creating them requires that teachers sensi-

tively and with determination prod students to reconsider some of their fundamental beliefs.

Reader response to multicultural literature frequently depends on the context provided

by a reader’s life and whether dissonance precipitates new understandings. Dissonance, or

discomfort with new ideas and experiences, can engage students in rethinking their ideas or

it can be a cause of distancing that interferes with learning.

A book we frequently discuss with teachers is a young adult novel by Jacqueline Wood-

son (1995),From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun. A work of realistic fiction, it is narrated by a

14-year-old African American boy named Melanin Sun. Through its main character, the book

confronts readers with incidents of racial tension and homophobia. Melanin Sun describes

an incident at the beach where he is taunted by a group of White boys. He also shares his

hostile reactions when he learns that his mother’s new love interest is a White woman.

Reader reactions to the book illustrate the importance of context for establishing meaning.

Although race is an active and potent issue for Black readers, most Whites see it as incidental

190 CHAPTER 7

FIG. 7.1 (Continued)

C) Scientists Solve a Mystery (Rewritten)

Do you look like your parents? Do you know why?

For many years scientists tried to understand how living things create new living things that look a

lot like them. We call this process reproduction. Tall parents usually have children who grow tall.

Dark-skinned parents generally have dark-skinned children. If parents have big feet, their children

probably also will have big feet when they become adults.

Some scientists believed that the key to reproduction was a molecule they called D.N.A. The prob-

lem was that the D.N.A. molecule is so small that the scientists did not know what it looked like. The

shape of D.N.A. was a real scientific mystery.

Teams of scientists guessed different shapes for D.N.A. They tried to fit different chemicals into a

complicated puzzle. Finally scientists named Watson and Crick drew the picture shown above. The

beauty of their picture was that it used all the chemical pieces and it showed how D.N.A. could repro-

duce by splitting. When scientists did more tests, it turned out that Watson and Crick were right. They

had solved the mystery of D.N.A.