Multicultural Literature

One of the most interesting quotes from Dong's article states, "The deeply rooted liberal-humanist ideology stressing that 'we are all the same' has added barriers to acknowledging and exploring issues of diversity." I feel that what Dong is saying is complete true; when we state "we are all the same" and preach the everyone is equal mantra over and over again, it is almost as if we are ignoring and disrespecting those minorities who have clearly not been treated with equality or as the same as everyone else throughout history. In the classroom, I think that an incredibly important aspect of teaching multicultural literature is immersing students in the history surrounding the actual events that may be depicted fictionally. For example, in my tenth grade English class we read the novel Night by Eli Wiesel. Before we even opened the novel, my teacher spent a few days exploring the realities and atrocities of the Holocaust and the persecution that people who were deemed unworthy went through. In relation to Esperanza Rising, I feel that the author does a good job of incorporating historical events into the novel in such a way that there is a natural open of sorts for the teacher to introduce historical events that can show students how truly real these situations and events in these fictional novels were.

I also found what Dong says about teacher empathy towards the events and realities they are teaching to be very interesting. As an education major, this seems on the surface to go against a lot of what we have been taught. Obviously no future teacher has ever been taught not to have sympathy or to try to understand or respect what minorities have gone through but we are encouraged to emotionally separate ourselves from our students and their experiences. The way that Dong describes teacher understanding and empathy seems to encourage a very emotional connection with the students; however, I think that perhaps Dong's intentions are simply misread and he is truly trying to get teachers to take a personal look at the literature they are teaching so that they can attempt to relate or convey the seriousness of these situations. Overall, I find Dong's message to be very understandable and accurate. In order to teach multicultural literature in a meaningful manner, we must look past the conventions of our past that encourage sugar-coating equality and teach the actual events and realities.