Writing the World:
Multicultural Approaches to
Teaching Writing
Kristen B. French
Center for Education, Equity and
Diversity
February 9, 2009
Where I Am From
• Liberal Education/Liberating education=Education
for Liberation (not assimilation)
• Not “either or…”, but “both and …” solution
(Tatum, 2007, p. 114)
• “Many students of color will have had reduced access
to high-level college preparatory courses and the
facilities to support such curriculum. Many White
students will have had less effective social preparation
for diverse campus life” (Tatum, 2007, p. 108).
• The following theoretical foundations frame this
discussion:
• Critical Literacy
• Decolonizing Theory
• Multicultural Education
Critical Literacy
• “… resists any simplistic or generic
definitions because its agenda is to examine
the relationships between language
practices, power relations, and identities and this analysis involves grappling with
specific local conditions.” (Comber, 2001,
p. 271)
Decolonizing Theory
• …the recentering of Indigenous and neocolonial
sociopolitical and historical perspectives for community
empowerment through critical personal narratives.
• Focus on strength model rather than deficit model
• Critical Personal Narratives
• Writing from the margins
• Maori Spiral Discourse Model
• based on a culturally constituted discursive practice, begins with a
formal welcome that values all participants voices equally,
emphasizing the sharing of power and reciprocity (Bishop, 2005,
p. 122).
• This spiral does not necessarily end when all have shared their
stories. Stories are retold, modified, deleted or adapted.
• Making meaning
Multicultural Education
• Alternative is monocultural education
• Multicultural Personhood
 1. We simply must learn more.
 2. We need to confront our own racism and biases
 3. Becoming a multicultural person means learning to see reality
from a variety of perspectives (Nieto & Bode, 2008, p. 425)
• Ethic of Care
• “..caring is just as important–and in some cases, even more so– than
larger structural conditions that influence student learning” (Nieto &
Bode, 2008, p. 292).
• “Care means loving students in the most profound ways: through high
expectations, great support, and rigorous demands” (Nieto & Bode,
2008, p. 292).
• Naming/Noticing, Acting, Reflecting (Bode &
Raible, 2008; Pollock, 2008)
Challenges for Students from
Diverse Backgrounds
• “I don’t belong here.”
• The struggles of first-generation and other
marginalized students
• “Where do I belong?”
• Reading the world then reading and writing the
word.
First-generation students experience difficulties prior to
and during college, which makes them vulnerable to lower
academic performance (Ramos-Sánchez & Nichols, 2007) :
• Predominantly from lower socioeconomic strata
• Underrepresented ethnic groups & speakers of home languages
other than English
• Less familial support
• See selves as:
 Less prepared, lacked basic knowledge about college, and
worried more about financial concerns
• Compared to traditional students first-generation students:
 Take fewer humanities courses, studied fewer hours, took fewer
credits, worked more hours, and were less likely to participate in
honors programs
 lower academic performance, more problematic transitions, and
higher levels of attrition
• Results: First-generation students encounter more
obstacles.
Reading the World then reading and writing
the word: Where do I belong?
• Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and
reading the word implies continually reading the world
(Freire, 1983, p.10).
• Students are already literate when they come to school,
how can we build on their ‘funds of knowledge’?
• Understanding that teaching students to read and write
(Freire,1983):
• As a political act
• As an act of knowledge
• As a creative act
• We transform our world by writing it and rewriting it.
What I have learned
• In 2007 WWU student body 83.1% White/ 16.9% students of
color
• The ABCs of Creating a Climate of Engagement (Tatum,
2007):
• Affirming Identity
• “It is often harder for those students who have been historically
marginalized in our culture to see selves reflected positively in
school” (p. 114).
• Building Community
• “Most of us are more willing to engage in the often-taxing
work of crossing social borders when we are operating from
strength” (p. 115).
• Cultivating Leadership
• “Leadership … requires the ability to think critically and speak
and write effectively, it also demands the ability to interact
effectively with others from different background” (p. 117).
Importance of Critical Literacy
• Writing the World
• Embedded in students’ lives
• Investigate structures and uses of home languages
and the language of power…standard English.
• Explicitly uncovering Power Relationships in the
World (Christensen, 1999):
• Whose language or dialect has power?
• Whose does not? Why not?
• What happens if someone has a Spanish or Vietnamese
accent? British accent
• How does language benefit some and hurt others?
What has worked for me
• I Am From poems (Christensen, 2001)
• Grounding curriculum in students’ lived experiences.
Affirming students’ multiple identities.
• Culture becomes visible, not just for students of color!
• Connecting students across lines of difference (Tatum,
2007)
• Critical engagement with socialization. Creating
“communities of conscience” (Christensen, 2001)
• Building relationships:
• Provide spaces for students to “feel significant and cared
about” (Christensen, 2001).
I Am From
By Kristen B. French
I am from an education of belly laughter
And repeated stories around the dinner table.
I am from woman magic
and secrets in the kitchen.
I am from frybread, the aroma of coffee and berry soup.
I am from dreaming on the banks of the Spokane river
watching for my grandfather in the distant rolling hills.
I am from walking barefoot in the grass.
I am from the shimmering quaking asps.
I am from the sm ell of Birch Creek.
I am from many generations
From t he land of Montana.
I am from the colon izer and the colonized.
I am from the th e Oregon Trail and the Trail of Tears.
I am from the boarding schools, Chemawa and Haskell.
I am from DaughterΥ
s of the Revolution and the Lincoln Memorial
I am
donΥtlook Indian.Σ
hat are you? Mexican?Σ
I am
can set
your teepee up in the front yardΣ
and Are her eyes blue?
No. ThatΥs a shame.Σ
I am from glorious familial love. I am from centuries
of strong women, Sandra ,Joyce, Violet,
and all my relations. I am Tsiwaki.
I am
rely on anyone to take care of you
always take care of yourselfΣ and I believe in you.Σ
I am from Sonia and Dale and their unending guidance and support.
I am from portables that smell of dust and bones.
I am from t eenage pregnancy and not fitting into small desks.
I am from enduranc e and perseverance.
I am from an Associates Degree, a MasterΥs and an Ed.D.
I am
atter What You Say or
What You Do I Will Always Love You.Σ
I am from forever loving Elizabeth and Charlie.
I am from books, paper, and pencils.
I am from t eaching the future.
I am from dreams of empowerment, revolution and justice.
I am from the pedagogy of hope and love.
Family Education History
Project
“I can voice my ideas without hesitation or fear because I am
speaking, finally about myself (p. 189). ~ June Jordan (1989)
• Me-search
•
•
•
Assignment Overview, for FEHP :
• Four-six pages, 1.5 spaced, 12 - Font /Times New Roman
• Critically engagement with course concepts and personal reflections. These
may include quotes, footnotes, or direct connections to concepts or
particular readings that you identify with in the course, such as privilege,
colorblindness, Americanization, tracking, language diversity, racism and
discrimination, etc...
• A bibliography of the course readings that you reference in your FEHP
using APA format (see below).
• Clear and concise writing and organization.
Three rough drafts: connection to history, education critical personal narrative,
and synthesis of text.
Creative choice (ex. This American Life, historical fiction, art~ boat, tree, book)
Critical Personal Narratives
…are reflexive self-narratives based in our multiple identities and
cultures, highlighted by performance, storytelling, the power to
disrupt, reproduce, reimagine, debate, and dialogue for social change,
reflecting our various ways of knowing – our written and oral
languages, with explicit charges for charting new spaces for
democracy, liberation, and consciousness raising as cultural workers.
 Testimonio = to bear witness
 The single voice has a multidimensional history reflecting the language,
symbols and cognitive values of a subaltern or marginalized people with the
purpose of speaking to hegemony and calling for action (Beverly, 2005).
 Autoethnography:
 is a “performance text,” a “turning inward waiting to be staged” (Denzin,
1997, p. 199)
 According to Holmes Jones, autoethnography, as a performance and personal
text, is a critical intervention in sociopolitical and cultural life called to
disrupt, produce and imagine the world for social change through viewing
the world from specific, perspectival and limited vantage points to engage
readers in dialogue and debate (2005, p. 761).
Concluding thoughts:
• Imagining the possibilities of a liberating
education with “fierce hopefulness”
(Raible and Bode, 2008)
• Dialogue…
References
Beverley, J. (2005). Testimonio, subalternity, and narrative authority. In N. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), The sage
handbook of qualitative research (pp. 547-557). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc.
Bishop, R. (2005). Freeing ourselves from neocolonial domination in research: A Kaupapa Maori approach to creating
knowledge. In N. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), The sage handbook of qualitative research (pp. 109-138). Thousand
Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc.
Bode, P. & Raible, J. (2008). Talking About Race. National Association of Multicultural Education Conference
presentation. New Orleans, Louisiana.
Christensen, L. (2001). Where I’m from: Inviting students’ lives into the classroom. In B. Bigelow, B. Harvey, S. Karp, and
L. Miller (Eds.), Rethinking Our Classrooms, Volume 2: Teaching For Equity and Justice, Rethinking Schools, Ltd.,
Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Christensen, L. (1999). Critical literacy: Teaching reading, writing, and outrage. In Carole Edelsky (Ed.), Making justice
our project: Teachers working toward critical whole language practice, Urbana, Illinois: National Council of
Teachers of English.
Comber, B & Simpson, A. (Eds.) (2001). Negotiating critical literacies
in classrooms. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Denzin, N. (1997). Interpretive ethnography: Ethnographic practices for the 21st century. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Freire, P. (1983). The importance of the act of reading. Journal of Education, 165(1), pp. 5-11
Holmes Jones, S. (2005). Autoethnography: Making the personal political. In N. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), The sage
handbook of qualitative research (pp. 763-791). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, Inc.
Jordon, J. (1992). Technical difficulties. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Nieto, S. & Bode, P. (2008). Affirming diversity: The sociopolitical context of multicultural education (5th ed.). New York:
Allyn & Bacon
Pollock, M. (Ed.) (2008). Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school. New York: The New Press.
Ramos-Sánchez, L. & Nichols, L. (2007). Self-efficacy of first-generation and non-first-generation college students: The
relationship with academic performance and college adjustment. Journal of College Counseling, 10 (1), pp. 6-18
Tatum, B. ( 2007). Can we talk about race?: And other conversations in an era of school resegregation. Boston,
Massachusetts: Beacon Press.