Week 2: Development of
Multicultural Literature
Instructions for Weekly Online Activities/Assignments
ENGL 231: JC Clapp (North Seattle Community College)
Due no later than Thursday, October 8, 2009 by 11:00 p.m. PST: Choose three children's books all representing the same culture (for example, three books all depicting African-Americans, or three books all set in Mexico). Pages 88-93 in your textbook can help with this if you find yourself at the library not knowing how to get started. You may want to choose a culture that you are familiar with, though you are not required to. Once you have your three books, evaluate them, individually and as a set, according to the criteria established on page 86 of Chapter 3 titled "Evaluating Literature Through a Multicultural Lens". (The criteria are also online, if you don't have your book with you: http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0073378569/student_view0/chapter3/evaluation_guides.html) Create a comprehensive post that includes complete evaluations of your three chosen books. You do need to address all of the categories thoroughly (and label them). So, you'll need to have a section labeled "Diversity and Range of Representation" and one labeled "Avoidance of Stereotyping," etc., and under each then answer, in paragraph format, the evaluation questions for the books you've chosen. Consider the books individually and as a set. Be sure to include the titles, authors, publishers, and copyright dates (all the bibliographic data) as well in your post! Title your post with the culture your books represent.
Due no later than Monday, October 12, 2009 by 11:00 p.m. PST: Read all of your classmates evaluation posts, and then choose one of the cultures you see represented more than once. So, you might notice that three of your classmates chose to evaluate books depicting Asian-Americans. Then, synthesize the evaluations of that particular culture and draw some conclusions about how that particular culture seems to be represented in the sampling. So if you chose to look at your classmates' evaluations of Asian-American books, you'd compile and synthesize all of the evaluations about Asian-American books and see what conclusions/common themes you could pull out. The idea is to see if there are particular trends in children's literature surrounding particular cultural perspectives. Are some cultures more likely to be stereotyped than others? Is there a range of representations? Have the representations changed with time? (Consider when the various books were written for context!)