Receptive Yet Self-Centered Stances to Racialized Stereotypes: Singaporean Students Respond to Literary Representations of Intersectional Inequality

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:40 am Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Diverse Qualitative Approaches to Readers' and Teachers'/Candidates' Text Engagement (Table 2)

Abstract

Studies of student responses toward racial injustice in Literature classrooms at secondary levels are rarely situated outside Western Anglophone contexts. In this paper, I examine how students from mainstream Singapore secondary schools respond to a poem depicting intersectional inequality in the Malay community. I draw on the theoretical framework of Dialogic Ethical Criticism that posits a continuum of three stances of ethical responses to the Other, focusing on the receptive yet self-centred stance. I examine uptake in episodes and utterances of classroom discourse in two classes of Secondary 3 students, showing how students self-consciously and collectively express concerns about articulating racialised stereotypes and offending Malay peers. Such student responses show the need for clear distinctions between naming and condoning prejudices.

Author

• Dominic Nah, National Institute of Education - Nanyang Technological University