When I first began teaching, 14 years ago, the texts to which we had access in middle school ELA were somewhat limited. Working at a school in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia, HOLT's Elements of Literature (I think it was a year 2000 edition) still had a majority of short stories by white dead men. Not to say they weren't useful for instruction, but Poe's The Cask of Amontillado and that ubiquitous story where the man is hunted, The Most Dangerous Game, are a far cry from relevancy to what was then a majority African American population. In the years since, money has been made available to teachers to buy a wider range of texts, and the textbooks have been significantly updated and diversified. I've submitted and been granted many Donorschoose grants for relevant novels, and I've learned a lot about selecting literary texts that can be used as high interest AND instructional texts for the purposes of analysis.
In the last few years, more of my students have been of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian descent, and I have been dragging my heels trying to find good, relevant texts to support and reach these learners and engage them with culturally relevant texts. I am currently on a fact finding mission to identify, read, and create instructional plans for texts that are written by Asian-American writers, but also works in translation from these countries. I have found it particularly challenging to find Chinese novels in translation that are useful for higher level English literary and analytical instruction.
I am trying to take a dive into Chinese science fiction with The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (as suggested by this cool individual on youtube), but am stuck somewhere in the middle, trying to get a general understanding of the physics concepts involved. I keep joking that the Chinese education system probably churns out students who have a generally better physics background than Americans might, so the science is not remotely dumbed down for readers like me. Sad, but true (says the English major who didn't pay much attention in physics class in high school).
Anyhoo. This is a journey I am on, and I look forward to continuing and finding some great texts to develop plans for in the next bit.
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