Multicultural Literature and Literacies: Making Space for Difference

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Suzanne Miale Miller, Suzanne M. Miller, Barbara McCaskill
SUNY Press, 1993 M01 1 - 300 pages
Does literature serve a humanizing function? Can it achieve social transformation? What roles does literature play for defining self, creating community, and achieving global perspective? This is the first book to thoroughly explore the methods by which educators, creative writers, and policymakers have constructed workable models of teaching literature in multicultural classrooms.

The authors provide an interdisciplinary dialogue on the setbacks, solutions, silences, and successes that often occur in classes of multicultural literature. They all take the stance that definitions of literacy and literature originate as much outside the classroom as within it.

With the inclusion of essays by writers themselves--a feature provided by no other book on this subject--the authors offer a unique vocalization of the nationalistic, economic, empowering, and moral purposes that reading and writing serve. The book also includes a current guide to selected resources in multicultural literature, in hopes of encouraging and facilitating instructors in the transformation of their own literature courses into multicultural ones.

From inside the book

Contents

A Poets Literacies
21
Literacy and Empowerment
37
A Stamp on the Envelope Upside Down Means Love
77
The Ideology of Canons and Cultural Concerns
105
Suzanne K Sutherland
129
Reading against the Cultural Grain
163
Some Notes on the Canon and Multiculturalism
179
The Teachers Perspective
187
Questions of Pedagogy and Multiculturalism
205
Multicultural Literacy in a Middle School Writing Workshop
219
Why a Dialogic Pedagogy? Making Space for Possible Worlds
247
Selected Resources for Multicultural Education
267
About the Editors
270
Contributors
289
Copyright

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About the author (1993)

Suzanne M. Miller is Assistant Professor in the School of Education at the State University of New York, Albany.

Barbara McCaskill is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Georgia, Athens.

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