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In Teaching and Learning About Multicultural Literature: Students Reading Outside Their Culture in a Middle School Classroom, author Janice Hartwick Dressel shares the findings of her study of one teacher, Ann, and Ann's eighth-grade classes of 123 readers who participated in a multicultural literature unit. An outstanding feature of this study was that the majority of the students were white-that... More

In Teaching and Learning About Multicultural Literature: Students Reading Outside Their Culture in a Middle School Classroom, author Janice Hartwick Dressel shares the findings of her study of one teacher, Ann, and Ann's eighth-grade classes of 123 readers who participated in a multicultural literature unit. An outstanding feature of this study was that the majority of the students were white-that is, the dominant culture-and studied novels representing nondominant cultures. The study's purpose was to find out what dominant-culture students learn when reading novels about people from cultures different from their own. To determine student learning and whether Ann had met her instructional goals, the author examined students' written work assigned during the unit. Samples of these writing assignments presented in the book include

o a Book Club Organizer in which students kept notes and information about characters, setting, and theme;
o a Dialogue Journal in which students wrote to one another about their novels; and
o a Pre- and Post-Unit Survey in which students answered questions about their reading and about their novels.

In addition to presenting the outcomes of the study and sharing what the students' writing revealed, Dressel also reviews the findings of other researchers in similar studies, discusses the teacher's role in students' learning and reading of multicultural literature, and makes suggestions for what teachers can do in their own classrooms to help students integrate personal response and social responsibility.

Although the readers discussed in the book are primarily white, the viewpoints and recommendations shared have more to do with differences in power than with differences in color. Because differences in power exist among people of all ages, genders, and ethnicities, the findings will interest readers regardless of their students' backgrounds. Teaching and Learning About Multicultural Literature will help teachers and students, particularly students from a dominant culture, read multicultural literature with greater understanding.

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