ABSTRACT
This chapter presents four specific strategies for effectively using literature to facilitate deep learning about diversity. This discussion uses a theoretical perspective that can guide the development of additional strategies. Specifically, McLaren offers a typology of four forms of multiculturalism, namely “conservative,” “liberal,” “left-liberal,” and “critical”, each representing a different way of thinking about difference and diversity. The historical and cultural contexts for multicultural literature are essential companions to the texts themselves in the critical multiculturalist’s effort to acknowledge and accommodate differences and situate those differences within history and lived experience. A practice for helping students appreciate the differences between and among groups invokes Graff’s call to “teach the conflicts”. By including critical and popular debates and the conflicts between disciplinary figures and theories, classrooms become sites that challenge tendencies toward oversimplifying, romanticizing, and monolithically representing complex groups, relationships, and power dynamics.
