Final Blog Post for Class

What Diverse Literature Means to Me

One of the most important things that I feel I learned from this class is that even if I do not know if something is quality accurate literature for representing a diverse group, there are so many resources available to me to check out the value of a book for a certain culture. As a Caucasian middle-class female, I do not fit into very many of the categories of multicultural literature, so as an outsider, I have to be able to reference insiders (people who know quite a bit more about the topic than myself) so that I as an outsider can expose my students to this other literature even though I may not know much about it. I think that including multicultural literature in my class will be almost as much of a learning experience for me as it will be for my students.
Another thing that I learned from this class was that diverse literature encompasses so many different types of literature, and that to try and classify them into a few groups is not accurate at all. Even though the class strives to educate people about all of the different types of literature, it still falls short by having to combine groups in order to cover more information. Even within my topic, there are so many ways to divide it even further to address more specifically a certain group.
On a final note: Diverse or Multicultural literature may seem like a part of language arts, but after taking this class I would categorize it as a part of social studies. Ideas about this topic are constantly changing and being shaped by society. There is not a set of prescribed rules about how to teach it like there are with other subjects like math or some of the subsets of language arts.