Journal #1

This is my first journal entry for Jill Flynn’s 5410 class, and I am glad she is asking for informal reactions to the reading assignments. I will definitely go with the stream of consciousness model in responding to the author’s ideas. Here goes.

Smagorinsky’s piece about rethinking the curriculum from a multicultural perspective belabored the obvious. I know, this is merely an excerpt from a larger work, so I should be careful making generalizations, but there was not a lot of new material in this reading, at least not for me.

What I found valuable, though, was the list of considerations and questions on pages 290 and 291. While it is great for us to ponder these and even discuss them as teachers (and administrators), I think a more interesting discussion would be with our students and their parents. While I have some strong opinions on a few of them, I would love to hear the positions and rationales of the kids themselves.

One I would like to hear them take on is #8 which asked whether a member of one cultural group can authentically write about the experienced of another. Several of the texts I have used could have been challenged along these lines, but never was. For example, I mentioned in class the book “Montana 1948.” It is written by a white man, but the book addresses issues of racism regarding the Indians in that place and at that time. The narrator is a grown man recalling the events of that summer when he was just 11 years old, so we read about the events through the prism of his adult reflections on the impressions (and limited understanding) of a pre-pubescent only child growing up in a remote, rural area.

One reason I think this book wasn’t challenged is that the students had not read much about Indians in the 20^th century and lacked a frame of reference. I taught the book for three years to hundreds of students (only three of whom were Indians), and more often than not they looked at the way racism was demonstrated by the characters in the book and related it to their own experiences. Not once was there a comment minimizing the effect of the author’s work based on his race.

I was also interested in the Smagorinsky’s thoughts about teaching “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” I have not taught this book, but it feels like I have with all the discussions about it with other teachers, plus having taken my four children through it when they were reading it in school.

This summer I read “Finn,” a first novel by John Clinch that examines the character of Huck’s dad. It was very well done, and incorporated and contextualized all the scenes from Twain’s original text having to do with Huck’s father and gives the reader a whole new lens through which Huck can be examined and evaluated. While Clinch chose not to use dialect as Twain did, he does use the word “nigger” quite often. Also, he puts forward the idea that Huck was biracial. While this is not a new idea, he puts an interesting twist on it and I think this would foster all kinds of discussions in a high school classroom.

Smagorinsky’s final questions on page 299 work from the assumption that the diversification of curriculum is done with the goal of representing varied cultural groups, even though he had just demonstrated the futility of that because it ends up being a reductive exercise. My goal would not be to diversify the curriculum so that students and parents would be able to say, “Look, here is a book about/by someone who looks like me,” but rather to use books that enable them to see the varied experiences, both struggles and victories, of people groups that are different from themselves and their experiences so as to gain a glimpse of understanding of others.