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The Dangers of a Single Story
The Dangers of a Single Story
Before we dove into our book clubs, where we explored character traits and identity markers in literary characters, we wanted to emphasize to students the importance of diverse perspectives in the stories we see, hear, and share. These two videos (right) provided context for those conversations so that students could see concrete examples of how the limited understanding of others' identities by people in society can negatively impact the people whose stories are marginalized.
YA Literature Audit
YA Literature Audit
Before we started reading our novels, we wanted to recognize the biases that can exist in literature by examining that authors who are telling the stories. Students worked in their book club groups to examine the identity markers of the author of their book. Then, to expand our understanding, students split up and examined the identity markers of the authors who appear on the list of Time Magazine's Top 100 YA Novels of All-Time. Groups shared which identity markers were most common amongst those authors and examined the trends that can help us recognize the single story bias. The results were collected on chart papers around the room (below) and then graphed those results in a spreadsheet.
Textbook Audit
Textbook Audit
In addition to analyzing the authors of popular literary works, we also took the time to conduct a textbook audit of an American History Social Studies textbook that was used in our school prior to the development of our Humanities program. In small groups, students were asked to review a few chapters from the textbook to look for images of people of color and to collect information about how often they appeared and how they were being portrayed. The results were shocking to the students, as they noted that very few images of people of color were present in this textbook about "American History" unless they were depicting war, slavery, or segregation.
IMG_1508.MOVIMG_1509.MOV(Above: As we reviewed the first chapter of the textbook together for our textbook audit, students were shocked to find that there were very few images of people, even though the title of the chapter was "The First Americans." When we finally found an image of people, we celebrated, but also acknowledged the biases that the textbook's authors displayed by choosing to leave out images of indigenous people until the second chapter when White European explorers arrived.)
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