Welcome to My House: African American and European American Students' Responses to Virginia Hamilton's House of Dies Drear

The first section of this article addresses the relationship between reader response and culture. The second section consists of portraits of a teacher and her students as they navigated their way through a series of African American literary texts. Most of my remarks focus on Virginia Hamilton's House of Dies Drear (1968) because the reading of this text marked a turning point for the teacher and students I observed. The portraits are drawn from a study which sought to explore the cultural dimensions of reader response among poor and working-class African American and European American high school students (Spears-Bunton, 1989). Ethnographic data including class observations and interviews were collected from a single eleventh-grade honors English class of 28 students for six months. The school in which the data were collected serves two neighborhoods-one mostly African American, the other mostly European American-with a history of racially motivated animosity between them. All subject names used in this article are pseudonyms.