“‘Speaking Up’ and ‘Speaking Out’: Examining ‘Voice’ in a Reading/Writing Program with Adolescent African Caribbean Girls,” Annette Henry
Henry presents a powerful argument regarding the critical importance of voice. even her introductory explanation of how many minority students are “voiceless,” made me think of how we often trivialize “multicultural” literature in high school curriculums. Teachers often understand the need for multicultural lit, understand why it is called for, but because it is out of our comfort zone – because it doesn’t speak for us, and maybe therefore doesn’t speak to us, we don’t really engage with this literature, we don’t give it its due, and go back to what we know, what we were taught in high school, the classic literary canon. The “good” literature – the literature about us, by us, for us. So where do minority students fit in that paradigm? Do they fit in Crooks’ role from Of Mice and Men, the social outcast because of his race, or do they fit in Tituba’s role in The Crucible, the slave whose cultural practices deem her as evil? In tenth grade – I’m embarrassed to admit that outside of literature circles (Walter Dean Myers), a few short stories (Alice Walker, Amy Tan) and a poem or two (Langston Hughes) – all of which are choices, I teach them because I choose to, not because they’re required – we offer no minority voice. None. We offer Night, a Holocaust memoir, a situation entirely outside the students realm of experience. So why is that more valid than teaching Black literature? Or any cultural pieces? Where are my students supposed to find their voice? Their mentor authors?
The same is true on a gender level. The majority of our novels highlight male protagonists – Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, The Giver, Night, Macbeth, Death of a Salesman, etc. We offer very few literary works that highlight the teenage experience, much less the female teenage experience (or any female experience outside of being married to the protagonist in many cases…)
Again, I’m frustrated that I’ve allowed such a gap to form between my incredibly impassioned time as a feminist/cultural studies scholar in college to a high school English teacher fighting a losing battle, but perhaps that’s because I’m not fighting hard enough.
- Henry speaks to this idea, however, at the end of the article: “There can be a danger for educators desirous of ‘transformative’ learning environments to feel that we have done our part by providing ‘culturally relevant’ texts or books with female protagonists. Indeed, such acts can go far in allowing children to see themselves reflected in literature and to make connections with their own lives. In this project, I was reminded of how the complexity of social locations – language, socioeconomic background, gender, race, and national origin – all configure and are implicated in our identities and ideas in far-reaching ways. Thus, although I thoughtfully chose themes that were culturally engaging for this population of Black girls, their interests and ideas revealed a more complex web of socially regulated discursive formations” (p.248) So while I can attempt to remedy our gaps with regards to literature, it is perhaps through discussion and student-directed expressive writing that I can make more of a difference in my classroom.
“Their silence, or non-speech, is a text in itself” (p.236) – this is such a vital and central idea. Silence is absolutely a text in the classroom – whatever the reason behind it, a student who doesn’t/can’t engage in the class is not likely to be successful. And not analyzing this text of silence, when we analyze all other texts, is unforgiveable.
