Date: Tue, 27 Aug 1996 21:46:13 -0600
Subject: Postcolonial criticism and secondary English curricula


Hello,

As a high school English teacher and graduate student in Education, I am
interested in communicating with fellow educators and others regarding
multicultural content in secondary English language arts curricula. I am
currently preparing to write my master's thesis, which will include a
post-colonial criticism of a particular secondary English curriculum and
make recommendations for improvements based on research. I am concerned that
students in my province may continue to receive an English language arts
education that focuses on stories and poetry by dead, white, European males
while excluding the literature and experiences of others -- and that this
marginalization may have significant repercussions on students'
self-concepts, attitudes and behaviour.

The implementation of multicultural curricula raises issues such as the
following: (1) the possibility that some quarters of the population may
resist the inclusion of  multicultural content; (2) the nature of the
relationship between multicultural content and students' perceptions of
people from cultures not their own; (3) the implications of using
pedagogical approaches such as Reader's Response, Co-operative Learning and
Writer's Workshop on multicultural content; (4) the potential gap between
author intent and student perception of literary texts; (5) the
applicability of post-colonial criticism to the analysis on non-literary
texts such as curricula; and (6) the potential difficulties of teaching
post-colonial literary theory to high school students.

If you have suggestions or ideas on these or related topics, or have some
experience in the development and promotion of multicultural literature, I
would be delighted to hear from you.

My e-mail address is <Daviesro-AT-meena.cc.uregina.ca>.

Regards,

Robert Davies



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