Historical Consciousness, Historical Empathy and Multicultural Community
Citizens cannot make informed and critical decisions on civic matters—from affirmative action and gay marriage to criminal justice and war—without an understanding of past people and events. Knowledge of the past should help shape our opinions in the present and our vision for the future. The novel My Mother the Cheerleader (Sharenow, 2007) is about 13-year-old Louise, whose mother is one of the “cheerleaders” who stands outside the school of Ruby Bridges (one of the first African American students to attend an integrated U.S. school) each day, screaming racist epithets. In Before We Were Free (Alvarez, 2002), a family is involved in a plan to topple the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in the 1960s. Tree Girl (Mikaelson, 2004) takes place in Guatemala in the 1980s during the country’s devastating civil wars. The brutality of slavery—and the passionate force of poetry—is explored in The Poet Slave of Cuba (Engle, 2006), a biography (written in verse) about Juan Francisco Manzano.
“Multicultural” education is often limited to teaching about different cultures’ food, fashion, and holidays. While it is important to help students appreciate cultural differences, this does not begin to tap into the political and moral issues of race and culture in our country and around the world. The growing body of young adult literature with multicultural themes opens up bold opportunities to engage students in exploring issues of culture and prejudice (Landt, 2006; Singer & Shagoury, 2005). The graphic novel American Bom Chinese (Yang, 2006) tells three stories that connect the themes of cultural identity and intolerance. Crossing Jordan (Fogelin, 2000) is about two girls, Replica Breitling Watches one African American and the other Caucasian, who become best friends in spite of the Caucasian girl’s father’s racism. And Boy Meets Boy (Levithan, 2003) uses magical realism to tell the story of a gay high school boy whose community and school celebrate homosexuality rather than oppress it.
Nearly two thirds of Americans say that they do not pay attention to international current events on a regular basis (Pew, 2007b). Given the void of global content in so many of our schools, it should not come as a shock that U.S. citizens know little about the world beyond the country’s borders. Good books, either as part of a literature curriculum or integrated into the social sciences, help to humanize other countries and cultures for young Americans and connect across oceans. In Chanda’s Secret (Stratton, 2002) a girl struggles to deal with the AIDS epidemic in her African country. McCormick’s (2006) Sold (written in verse) is about 13-year-old Lakshmi who has been sold into prostitution and taken from her home in India to Nepal. Asphalt Angels (Holtwijk, 1995) explores the brutal life of the homeless “street children” of Brazil.
Social responsibility requires consciousness to environmental problems and the ability to critique the American way of life. Beyond simply studying recycling and pollution, this would include exploring issues of energy, natural resources, and rampant consumerism. In Firestorm: The Caretaker Trilogy Book 1 (Klass, 2006), Jack thinks he’s just a normal high school kid until he finds out he has been sent from 1,000 years in the future to save the earth from our own environmental destruction. Another book by Klass (1994) is California Blue, which is about a high school student living in the U.S. northwest who discovers a new butterfly species on land owned by the local lumber mill where his father works. The Gospel According to Larry (Tashjian, 2001) is about 17-year-old Josh who creates an alter ego (Larry) on a website who espouses the dangers of consumerism. And in Exodus (Bertagna, 2008), it is 2099 and global warming is melting Earth’s polar ice caps.
The findings, published in the Food Additives and Contaminants Journal, confirmed what consumers of organic food have taken for granted but did not settle the argument over whether organic food is safer than conventional food treated with chemical pesticides. The debate gained prominence in February 2000 when John Tassel, a correspondent on the ABC News program “20/20”, reported that testing had proved that the levels of pesticide residues in conventional produce were similar to those in organic produce, making organic claims a fraud. Though Mr. Tassel withdrew his statement – such testing had never been conducted – his report alarmed supporters of organic agriculture and those like Consumers Union who do not oppose the use of synthetic pesticides but want stricter standards.
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