Beyond Lip Service: How teachers in a private school utilize multicultural literature

Abstract

This qualitative dissertation is an investigation of the experiences of four middle grade teachers, three female and one male, three Caucasian and one African American who use multicultural literature in their language arts classrooms and the responses of the students of color they teach. The teaching experience of the teacher participants ranged from nine to twenty-five years. This bounded case study was investigated through the interpretivist paradigm over a seven-month period during the 2009-2010 school year. The teaching of six texts defined by the school as multicultural (one of the texts would not be viewed as multicultural by other definitions), Esperanza Rising and Journey to the River Sea were the fifth grade texts, Roll of Thunder Hear my Cry was the sixth grade text, The House on Mango Street and To Kill a Mockingbird were the seventh grade texts and A Raisin in the Sun was the eighth grade text. Through the lens of multiculturalism, specifically Banks' (1994) dimensions of multicultural education and Groban's (2007) tenets of critical multiculturalism, and the participant teachers, enactments were explored. The data gathered over the seven-month investigation included audiotaped classroom observations, focus groups, and two types of teacher interviews, faculty interviews, observational field notes, and teacher pedagogical artifacts. The interpretivist paradigm was utilized to coded and analyzed the data using modified analytic induction, descriptive activity codes (Bogdan & Bilken, 2003), and cross case analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1994). Enactments of multiculturalism, relationship between philosophy and pedagogy, and experiences of the teaching of multicultural literature were the three groups of thematic findings related to the teachers. The thematic findings related to the students of color who participated include: pondering pedagogy, multicultural literature mindsets, and dealing with diversity. This investigation concludes that teacher pedagogy, peer response, and literature discussion appear to influence the student participants' cultural understandings. Implications for practice and further research are included.