期刊名称：Teaching American Literature : A Journal of Theory and Practice
电子版ISSN：2150-3974
出版年度：2013
卷号：6
期号：2
页码：66-82
出版社：Teaching American Literature
摘要：Although all students experience difficulty working with concepts like white privilege or institutional racism, American literature survey students seem particularly reluctant to analyze narratives that either propose alternatives to melting pot conceptions of American identity or that require them to examine ethno -racial, class, gender, and linguistic dynamics from which they might benefit. The reason for students' resistance may be twofold: first, many students expect the survey to reflect their own (predominantly white) racial, ethnic, class, and (primarily) monolingual English speaking social locations. And second, because most students have been taught at the K-12 level in ways that confirm their social loc ations, many are academically and emotionally unprepared to participate in university-level classes that employ a critical multicultural pedagogical approach. Consequently, in this article I review a strategy for addressing students' resistance to "minority" literature and to non-celebratory pedagogical methodologies, which is to facilitate a discussion about whiteness that focuses on the racialized dynamics inherent in different pedagogical approaches. This strategy is useful because it enables students to think purposefully about the way core subjects like American literature have been falsely constructed to naturalize whiteness, and about the extent to which American education was conceived from its beginnings as a socially conservative force. Second, it helps students discern how common approaches to teaching ethnic content can result in the trivialization of a culture, the reinforcement of stereotypes, and the erasure of relations of inequality. And, last, the strategy encourages students to re -consider the ideological position they often automatically assume "minority" writers to occupy¡ªin other words, students take steps toward recognizing writers do not consider, for instance, internal colonization, bilingualism, or nativism in order to attack monolingual white Americans, but rather to imagine a democratic alternative to a monolithic (literary and national) origins narrative that erases a sizable s egment of the nation's population. Ultimately, the strategy I outline accomplishes a vital objective of antiracist, critical multicultural pedagogy, which is to deconstruct that which we "take to be common sense" (Jay and Jones 107
