Cultural and Textual Literacies

I've always found articles like this interesting, and slightly paradoxical. They ridicule school systems for only catering to white, middle/upper class students, and suggest that the solution is to cater to the minorities in the class. If you do that completely, that just means that a different part of the class is alienated. This article discussed ways of teaching Hispanic students, but did not discuss how to reach students of all cultures at the same time; at least not explicitly.

The goal is to teach in a way that makes all of your students feel included and valued. Many of the activities that were suggested could do that, like creating a community and exploring different cultures and social issues present in the community. I am a great advocate of TIE, and having students explore issues in their lives and create art and motivate change through that exploration. One way to try to make sure that students of all ethnic and economic backgrounds feel represented is to allow them to come up with what they want to explore, instead of imposing an issue onto them. TIE calls upon life experiences and storytelling, and creates and community, all things that the article mentioned would be helpful to Hispanic students. But these practices would be useful to many other students as well. So instead of simply doing something in the classroom because it would work for a certain group of students, choose something becuase it would work for multiple groups.

This article mentioned that schools use the theatre canon, like Shakespeare, too much and that minority students don't connect with it. But the canon contains incredible theatre that, if taught correctly, can pull out themes and characters that can be connected with. So if you combine the canon with writings from other cultures as well as student created work, you can create a setting where students can connect with different cultures, with each other, as well as with the canon, which is still studied for a reason. You don't have to throw thousands of years of theatre out to teach minorities; that is almost racist to assume they can't connect or understand theatre that has been studied for generations. The issue is to find a balance, not swing from one extreme to the other. Don't cater to a group, find ways for everyone to connect.