Project Rationale

Perhaps if I begin at the very beginning. It seems appropriate to reflect on how I came to choose this focus for my project.

In early May of this year, we were each assigned a task in English to choose a poem suitable for use in a junior English class. It was interesting to me just how difficult I found this act of choosing. As I flicked through the pages of my own poor collection of poetry anthologies, vestiges of my undergraduate English days, I couldn’t help be aware of several factors . . .

I remembered just how impenetrable poetry seemed to me at high school. It seemed to me to be so multi-layered, so abstract. Its density of language, the very stuff that distinguishes it from prose, was a barrier to me. I could not understand it and so was intimidated by it. How much more impenetrable poetry must be to students from non-English speaking backgrounds?

In other words, I became conscious that poetry is inevitably underpinned by a certain kind of culture or worldview . . . its many allusions and assumptions about imagery, Euro-centric metaphors, Western concepts and conceptualisations of reality . . . its many layers of meaning, connotations, and phrases triggering thought to the native reader while alienating the ESL reader . . .

My concern here, however, is not so much with the linguistic difficulties of English literature for ESL learners. They are indeed unavoidable and a natural part of the language learning process. It is instead the area of cultural bias that I want to explore.

What is cultural bias?

If cultural bias is the culturally-embedded conceptual underpinnings of a piece of writing, it seems that it is indeed a natural and inevitable part of literature, unproblematic because of its inevitability. Fictions are characteristically permissive, embracing many realities at once, although taken individually, a work of fiction does not pretend to represent the world holistically. As the anthropologist James Clifford observes:

The word [fiction] as commonly used in recent textual theory has lost its connotation of falsehood, of something merely opposed to truth. It suggests the partiality of cultural and historical truths, the ways that they are systematic and exclusive.

Fictional worlds are not real. They are constructions of the imagination. They may be naturalistic, apparent mirrors of contemporary life. But they may also be fantastic, the product of the shared wild imaginings of writer and reader. As such fictional truths are "inherently partial - committed and incomplete".

The reliance upon discursive commonality - the communicative link between writer and reader - is basic to the effective use and understanding of any genre. However, this relationship is intensified in fiction since fiction by nature relies less on exposition as on the portrayal of experience. The nuances and inflections of language give fiction its depth and power, whereas ‘factual texts’ try to write out uncertainty in language by pinpointing meaning in symbolic terms and usages.

Resultingly, the limitedness of fiction to express only in the terms of one worldview seems constitutional. It is also culturally alienating - of particular concern in the educational context.

Teaching choices that underplay the significance of cultural bias, choose simultaneously to exclude students from ‘other’ cultural backgrounds from active readership and so effective learning, thus reinforcing the ascendancy of the dominant culture. This is of particular relevance in regard to canon-based literature teaching.

In his book The New Racism (1981), Barker introduces the notion of racism as a racial discourse wider than any specific action of discrimination or hostility. This discourse is highly complex, even contradictory and embedded in social processes and institutions. Resultingly, it becomes possible to conceive of institutionalised racism; the way in which social processes, procedures and structures work against individuals and groups. While I do not propose that cultural bias in literature is ‘racist’ as such, in the educational context I can see how teacher assumptions of universalism in regard to literature can actually work against minority cultural groups.

On this basis, how do we make literature more accessible to ESL students? We must as teachers begin by choosing texts carefully.

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So at first this project began as an interest in poetry - collecting poems accessible to the ESL student. However, it has since developed more broadly into an interest in adolescent literature, that kind of writing which targets readers of high school age. Here, I concentrate mainly on adolescent fiction, a style of writing which spans all genres, offering a particular age-group of readers a vast array of fictional worlds and imaginings.

The only thing that has intimidated me as I have ventured into these fictional worlds is the diversity and quantity to choose from. As such I have tried to review at least a small number of texts here. They are not necessarily representative of all that adolescent fiction has to offer. However, I have tried to read as widely as possible.

image courtesy of Amazon Books