Exploring Multicultural Literature: The Text, the Classroom and the World Outside

Exploring multicultural literature: the text, the classroom and the world outsideIn this essay I want to do three things.First, to explore the notion of multicultural literature.What do we mean by the term?What is it?And where did it come from?Second, I want to look at the relationship between texts, teachers and school students.And third, I want to glance at the world beyond the classroom, and suggest ways in which the literature read and written in the classroom can contribute towards students' understanding of and engagement with the wider world.In today's parlance this last focus might count as something to do with citizenship.So what is multicultural literature?It certainly didn't exist when I was at Oxford in the late 1970s and early 1980s -by which I mean that I spent seven years within the English Language and Literature faculty without ever being troubled by any awareness that there was such an animal as multicultural literature.In 1985, I started work as a schoolteacher, in a boys' comprehensive in Tower Hamlets.One of the first texts that I chose to read with my Year 8 group was Young Warriors (1967).The novel, by Jamaican author V. S. Reid, tells a coming-of-age story of five Maroon warriors who help their people to outwit and ambush the occupying Redcoat army.At this distance, I do not know why I chose it -whether it was to do with the boys' adventure story format of the novel, with its anti-imperialist narrative and positioning, whether it seemed to be accessible enough, to my highly inexpert eyes, for my students to be able to cope with it (whatever coping with it might mean).I asked my students to look at the front cover, to describe what they could see and then to predict as much as they could about the novel they were about to read.It's an interesting exercise, both as a way of activating students' prior knowledge and as an opportunity