Currently, in many high schools throughout Canada and
the United States, English teachers have been developing
literature curricula to meet the needs of their culturally
diverse students. However, because in most cases these
educators have not had at their disposal the interpretative
techniques of such postcolonial literary theorists as Edward
Said and Gayatri Spivak, they have been relying, instead,
for their reading strategies upon traditional literary
theories.
Unfortunately, when teachers employ New Critical,
archetypal, feminist, or reader-response methods of literary
analysis in their reading of multicultural literature, they
are often unaware of the Eurocentric biases contained within
these perspectives. This lack of understanding of their
theoretical frame of reference can then lead teachers to
encourage their students to accept uncritically problematic
representations of various cultural groups as they encounter
these representations in their literary texts. Postcolonial
literary theory, on the other hand, encourages students to
problematize Eurocentric representations of imperialism’s
Others.
The advantage to students who use postcolonial reading
strategies in order to become aware of the different ways in
which people at the margins and centres of empire view each
other is that they can thus attain higher levels of
multicultural literacy by performing more sophisticated and
complex interpretations of their texts than they might have
done using traditional interpretative approaches. At the
same time, the students’ use of postcolonial reading
strategies can help them to become more effective
intercultural communicators as they cross cultural borders
by carrying out collaborative responses to literary texts
with students whose heritage differs from their own.
This project, therefore, involves a critique of
existing conceptions of the high school multicultural
literature curriculum by comparing their key features with
those of the postcolonial conception. The principal focus
of the investigation is upon how the postcolonial approach
can help students to understand, more effectively than can
traditional conceptions, the necessarily dynamic and
heterogeneous textual representations of dominant and
subaltern cultures to be found in both Eurocentric and
postcolonial literary texts. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/6918 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Greenlaw, James C. |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 4163031 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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