| How do students from diverse cultural backgrounds respond to reading multicultural literary tests? What challenges and dilemmas might teachers face as they introduce a postcolonial pedagogy into contemporary classrooms? These questions guide this study of ways for students and teachers to cross borders constructed within discourses of race, class, gender and ethnicity. Drawing on postcolonial literary theory, critical theory, poststructuralism and reader-response theories, my study suggests theoretical and pedagogical frameworks for re-evaluating literary curricula and developing reading strategies for a pluralistic world.;This research journey is presented as a travel metaphor, beginning in apartheid South Africa where I taught an unexamined curriculum of Eurocentric literary texts. From there, the journey moves into an analysis of developments in multicultural literary education in Britain, the United States and Canada and a reflection on pertinent questions of canon, culture, identity and representation in literary texts. This theoretical landscape yields to explorations of teaching practice as I describe my collaborative research with a high-school English teacher in a Canadian multi-ethnic school where we introduced three grade levels of students to international texts, balancing aesthetic literary readings with sociopolitical discussions and deconstructive reading strategies. In a bricolage of theories, literary selections, reflections on teaching practice, teacher and student voices, I offer a variety of lenses for viewing the complex world of reading, teaching and learning.;Results from the study highlight advantages for minority and majority students of engaging with multicultural literature. When teachers adopt a critical pedagogy and a postcolonial literary stance, students may learn to recognize ambivalences inherent in the construction of cultural identities. They begin to deconstruct misrepresentations of the "other" in literary tests, and to acknowledge challenges to their perceptions of themselves.;The study illuminates complexities of translating theory into classroom practice, suggesting that teachers who strive to re-map literary worlds will be challenged to read literature set in unfamiliar cultural and linguistic contexts and to address new questions of text selection and student response. As unfamiliar voices are heard in the classroom, new tensions will arise as students respond in individual ways to issues of representation, power and difference. |
