Towards an Ethical Approach to Perspective-taking and the Teaching of Multicultural Texts: Getting Beyond Persuasion, Politeness and Political Correctness

This paper aims to problematize perspective-taking – an instructional practice widely thought to be useful in helping students develop the ability to better understand their own worlds and the worlds of others in multicultural texts. We provide examples that illustrate difficulties discovered in implementing a perspective-taking approach to teaching multicultural texts across three diverse classrooms. Specifically, these examples suggest that perspective-taking was perceived by students to be a rhetorical strategy that their teachers wanted them to acquire in the interests of persuasion, politeness, political correctness and uncritical tolerance. Through discussion of these examples this paper argues that in order for perspective-taking to be a valuable instructional strategy for teaching multicultural texts it must be grounded in a larger effort towards an ethical approach to response to multicultural texts – an effort by which teachers encourage ownership of initial responses, genuine and continual consideration of conflicting views, and a positioning of one's response in relation to those of others.