Chapter 4 discusses primarily the literary theory of Marxism. After completing the reading of this chapter I found 2 quotes or comments from the authors to be rather striking. The first one reads on pages 60,"In order for students to be able to understand themselves and each other, they need to be able to contextualize their knowledge in terms larger than themselves; in other words, they need to be able to place their own particular situations and the texts they read into a larger system or set of beliefs. It is for precisely this reason that the particular lens of Marxism can be useful". I found this to be quite interesting relating to the Marxism theory since I could not quite put my finger on exactly the purpose of Marxism. For students to go beyond their own personal situations like reader response, and to combine that with the text and form beliefs of their own appears to be quite productive and useful for students.
The second reads on page 72, "Some politically conservative communities may confuse the introduction of Marxist literary theory with the practice or indoctrination of communism, and teachers may receive negative reactions from parents, community members, administrators, and other teachers". This quote I found to be very irritating. I am so tired of hearing about all the things we cannot teach or things that are "risky" to teach in the classroom. I am also tired of trying to keep young adolescents so sheltered. By exposing them to things like Marxism and even GLBT themes within literary texts as well, allows students to become independent individuals, learn from other perspectives, and have their own voice instead of being influenced by everyone around them. Grrr...I say if we feel like teaching it, and it is relevant, teach it! After all it is our job to teach, and the students' job to learn.
p.s. I just went off on a tangent so hopefully that made some sort of sense.
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Sara, I agree with you about not keeping our adolescents so sheltered in the classroom, especially since they are dealing with topics much more harshly than even we had to when we were in high school. Holding this information from them in schools is almost saying they are wrong, or bad in some sort of way when i think that is something we need to get away from to make life a lot less stressful on a lot of students. However, i can see the parents and administrators point of view, where a lot of topics are still very controversial for the classroom. I think it depends a lot on what type of classroom you are in to be able to teach these types of theories.
We are going to have some good class discussion today. This is an important topic and I want to make sure everyone in the class has thought hard about her approach to controversial topics in the classroom. I don't have the answer and individual teachers need to make that choice themselves.
Webb gives some good advice in Chapter 6 on how to deal with some potentially sticky situations.
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