Summary Of Perspective Taking As Informative Practice In Teaching Multicultural Literature

Competency 7:
The teacher understands strategies for reading literary texts and provides students with opportunities to formulate, express and support responses to literature.
In “Perspective-Taking as Transformative Practice in Teaching Multicultural Literature to White Students” by Amanda Haertling Thein, Richard Beach, and Daryl Parks, the authors discuss the difficulties and successful tactics used to teach different perspectives to white students through the use of multicultural literature in the English-Language Arts classroom. Thein begins with explaining that changes do not happen overnight in students by reading literature, but that does not mean that change is not able to happen. Thein concedes “that significant changes in beliefs
This allows students, as Thein writes, to explore “the ways that our beliefs and perspectives arise from historical, social, and cultural worlds in which we grow up and live” (57). Beyond teaching diverse texts, Parks also brings in teaching strategies in order to increase students comprehension of new perspectives. These strategies include: performance activities where “each student [creates] a ‘monologue’ for one character from a novel that the class had read” (58), “voicing broad prototypical perspectives, rather than their personal perspectives,” and writing journal prompts that allow students to “carefully contemplate the motivations behind [a character’s] actions and behaviors and to simultaneously consider ways that they could help other characters to look beyond their preconceived notions of [that character]” (59). Thein and her co-authors do not “ask students to dismiss the beliefs… they bring with them to the classroom” (59). Instead, they
In Competency seven, one of the requirements calls for students to “view literature as a source for exploring and interpreting human experience” (State Board 12). Through the suggested drama activity, students can choose different characters in the novel to explore. This goes along well with To Kill a Mockingbird because Jim, Scout, and Dill create small performances for themselves to act out the actions of what they believed motivated Boo Radley to stay indoors at all times. This learning activity is closely related to characters’ actions in the book, which I can explain to students when motivating them to dive into the assignment and challenge themselves to take on a new perspective of a character. Through the performance of monologues of the characters, I can then lead students into “discussions about the character’s perceptions and actions and the believability of the performer’s character development” (58). Thein explains that this allows students to not only understand what it is that the characters are doing but why they choose to do those things: “These role-play meetings [encourage] them to frame the details in terms of characters’ internal motivations for their actions” (58). By assigning the students take on the characters’ perspectives,