ABSTRACT

In the previous chapter, we discussed the ways students in our study experimented with adopting different stances and roles in a course on multicultural literature. In this chapter, we explore the techniques employed by the teacher, Daryl Parks, in not only fostering students’ responses to multicultural literature but also in socializing high school students to assume the identities of college students engaged in critical analysis of literature. In any classroom community of practice, the teacher assumes a central role in helping students acquire new practices and discourses through modeling and scaffolding these practices (Edelsky, Smith, & Wolfe, 2002; Wenger, 1998). Parks played a somewhat unusual role in that he mentored students operating in a relatively controlled, traditional high school world to adopt unfamiliar, new identities associated with being college students. And he also assumed a key role in helping students with little experience in critical literary analysis to acquire such approaches to analyzing literature. Further, given the challenges of entering into alternative cultural worlds in responding to multicultural literature, Parks provided students with ways of understanding different cultural perspectives as constituted by discourses and cultural models of race, class, and gender.