Ethnicity and the Literary Aesthetic: White Preservice Teachers Developing Cultural Competence Through Story

• In Event: Roundtable Session 95
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Discourse on Issues of Race and Ethnicity in Rural and Urban Programs

Abstract

Reading and reflection upon ethnically unfamiliar literature can encourage white teacher candidates to critically examine assumptions of self and other relative to race, culture, and language. However, ethnically unfamiliar literatures can be difficult for white readers to understand and appreciate due to the aesthetics (style of representation, narrative structure and strategies, terminology) they embody. Readers, in response to all texts, are bound by their understandings of the aesthetic, which, in turn, influence their attitudes toward what they read. This qualitative study infuses literature study among fourteen, white preservice teachers with the explicit examination of the literary aesthetic and explores how this examination influences preservice teachers’ understandings of and attitudes toward two works of ethnically unfamiliar literature and the people portrayed.

Author

• Wendy J. Glenn, University of Connecticut