How Does a White Educator Critically and Empathetically Teach Black Literature?
Date
2020-12-01
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Southern New Hampshire University
Abstract
Currently in the United States, there has been social and political unrest, reviving a surge
in racist ideologies. As an educator, I feel it is of the utmost importance for us to combat this
civil instability with a more effective strategy of teaching multicultural texts. It is important for
educators to find ways to empathize with people of all backgrounds and push against any
socially set anxieties in regard to teaching multicultural texts, so to illuminate upon ways
educators can find a semblance of reassurance and motivation to teach literary texts outside their
racial and ethnic backgrounds, I am adding to scholarship by intervening textually in a critical
reflective practice in which I engage important members of the Black community, both past and
present, in a Socratic Seminar to answer questions I have formulated that will help me and other
educators empathetically and critically teach Black literature. The methodological framework I
use is autoethnography, which enables me to connect the oppression I have faced in my life to
that of Blacks, and through a Critical Race Theory lens, I unveil some of the avenues White
educators can take to empathetically and critically teach Black texts in American schools.
Through the critical reflective practice in this paper, I expose, with the guidance of textual
intervention, how teachers can build upon their knowledge and understanding of Black literature
and how they can connect their lives and the lives of their students to the texts regardless of
racial and ethnic similarities and differences. The objective of this paper is to further the dialogue
about how educators teach and integrate multicultural texts in the classrooms and curricula
across America, particularly in the English discipline, and expose teachers to ways in which they
can disrupt any anxieties that have prolonged the neglection of the use of multicultural texts in
their classrooms.
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