Discovering the "I" in the "Other": Helping Students Develop Multicultural Perspectives

by Beverly-Lynne Aronowitz

from VCCA Journal, Volume 8, Number 1, Summer 1993, 16-23

© Copyright 1993 VCCA Journal

Creating sensitivity within students to cross-cultural perspectives is a gradual process, entirely dependent on a classroom which is structured as a democratic, social community. To achieve these ends, teaching and learning must be student-centered. With this in mind, I recently developed a student-centered course module for freshman composition aimed at developing multi-cultural awareness. This module was a contribution to Project International Emphasis, a state-wide program to establish global studies across disciplines in the Virginia community college system.

Course objectives included:

During the spring 1991 semester in two sections of English 112, students read two excerpts from contemporary literature by women: Bessie Head's short story "Looking for a Rain God" and Ntozake Shange's "beau willie brown" and "laying on of hands" from the author's choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. Cognitive and affective aspects of the material were not directly taught; rather, students worked on a series of tasks in small peer groups which inductively guided them to the desired objectives. Then, students discussed the results of their individual workshops in a peer-facilitated, whole group discussion. Finally, students wrote individual, thematic essays based on their workshop conversations.

Any number of multi-cultural texts could be substituted for mine; my emphasis is on the pedagogical process at work in this module, rather than any specific content. However, some explanation of my reasons for choosing these texts is necessary.

Shange and Head: Teacher's Perspective

I chose works from Head and Shange because each author, African and African-American, respectively, explores the circumstances in which children become victims even (and often) at the hands of their parents. Each author asks: What kinds of social calamities lead us to act so desperately? What causes us to kill those we love? The protagonists in each of the selections seek a solution to calamity through a higher power. In Head's story, the family in Botswana returns to the rites of an ancient religion for a solution. In the Shange sequence, the women of the rainbow find strength and comfort from the god in themselves, and they love her (63).

Bessie Head pictures the once lush and fecund African earth, which had sustained its human life, gradually gone dry during a seven-year drought, with no end in sight.

Toward the beginning of the seventh year of drought, the summer had become an anguish to live through. The air was so dry and moisture-free that it burned the skin. No one knew what to do to escape the heat and tragedy was in the air. At the beginning of that summer, a number of men just went out of their homes and hung themselves to death from trees. (Obradovic 90)

Ntozake Shange describes the inhabitants of an inner city in the U.S. who are no longer sustained by the nation's resources. She also briefly sketches the United States' destruction of another nation, Vietnam.

there waz no air/the sheets made ripples under his body like crumpled paper napkins in a summer park...
& he'd get up to make coffee, drink wine, drink water/he wished one of his friends who knew where he waz wd come by with some blow or some shit/anythin/there waz no air...
there waznt nothin wrong with him/he kept tellin crystal/any niggah wanna kill vietnamese children more n stay home & raise his own is sicker than a rabid dog/that's how their thing had been goin since he got back (Shange 55)

In each case, the families are wanting. In Botswana they are hungry and thirsty and maddened. In the inner city, they find little connection to self, to family, to community. In Botswana there is no rain; in the inner city "there [is] no air" (55).

Desperation leads to desperate acts. In the African example, recalling a traditional but banned ritual to summon a rain god through human sacrifice, the elder men, in all good faith, sacrifice their two small grandchildren.

Finally, an ancient memory stirred in the old man, Mokgobja. When he was very young and the customs of the ancestors still ruled the land, he had been witness to a rain-making ceremony. And he came alive a little, struggling to recall the details which had been buried by years and years of prayer in a Christian church. . . . There was, he said, a certain rain god who accepted only the sacrifice of the bodies of children.
After it was all over and the bodies of the two little girls had been spread across the land, the rain did not fall. Instead, there was a deathly silence at night and the devouring heat of the sun by day. A terror, extreme and deep, overwhelmed the whole family. They packed, rolling up their skin blankets and pots, and fled back to the village. (Obradovic 92)

In the poem set in the United States, in a fit of hopelessness and rage, willie lets drop his two small children from the fifth story. In the story set in Bostswana, grasping for a solution, the elders sacrifice their children. Each of the excerpts offers perspectives which reflect and illuminate the other.

In the African story, the last shred of faith, a renewed belief in the power of a deity, is called upon. But, in the U.S., the inner city is godless. There is no remembered center of belief. In the African excerpt, there is a community to reestablish a norm: the ancient rites had been outlawed and the elders punished. Family and community feel shame and repentance. In Shange's choreopoem, there seems to be no community norm by which to measure the extent and circumstance of this unreasonable act-- except for the voices of the women. The community of women create a new god, a female god in themselves.

I found god in myself & I loved her/I loved her fiercely. (Shange 63)

Head's story suggests we may not fully understand the kind of desperation which leads us to destroy ourselves and those we love; but we are all capable of unreasoned and destructive acts if driven by despair.

Throughout that terrible summer the story of the children hung like a dark cloud of sorrow over the village, and the sorrow was not assuaged when the old man and Ramadi were sentenced to death for ritual murder. All they had on the statute books was that ritual murder was against the law and must be stamped out with the death penalty. The subtle story of strain and starvation and breakdown was inadmissible evidence at court; but all the people who lived off crops knew in their hearts that only a hair's breadth had saved them from sharing a fate similar to that of the Mokgobja family. They could have killed something to make the rain fall. (Obradovic 93)

Both authors suggest that all human beings need to empathize with each other--no matter how heinous the act. Empathy and understanding, they suggest, would give impetus to finding solutions. These are some of the connections I hoped the students would make as they read, discussed, and wrote about these different textsand stepped toward building a global community.

The Students Discuss

As a community of interactive learners, we devoted three fifty-minute sessions to the Head short story and the Shange choreopoem, respectively. The sequence which I describe for the Head reading was repeated a week later for the Shange excerpt. After these discussion sequences, students wrote essays. To initiate the sequence, students considered a set of "preview statements" (Herber), to help them analyze rather than narrate, to help them focus on theme rather than story line. Discussion groups functioned as prewriting workshops. The small group work fostered close reading; the group worked together to find support in the texts for assertions made by group members.

After the small groups reconvened as a whole group, one classmate was elected by peers to lead the discussion. An excerpt from the discussion follows.

Mac: We have hunger; they have hunger. It's a matter of degree.

Ron: Yes, different degrees but we can still feel sadness.

Lee: The story's not about faith, it's about superstition. (Her voice has the unfaltering quality of reciting a catechism.) In times of desperation, we grasp at faith to find the certainty that faith gives us. Faith is what we hope for, what we cannot see that we are certain of. By sacrificing their children for rain, they were looking for faith. Faith is not something you look for.

Ron: Don't we use faith most in times of desperation? In his younger days, for the head of the family [the Mokgobja elder], sacrifice was his faith.

Jean: They were so desperate.

Sarah: Your background, your culture will influence how you behave. Who are we to judge?

Betty: The sacrifice was a ceremony.

Sean: A rite.

Betty: Something done over and over.

Sean: They hoped the ceremony would bring good to their community. They sacrificed their children for the good of the community--a harsh penalty for someone who tried to help.

Betty: These people were dying. It was a life and death situation. "I'm not going to eat." The women were haunted by what would happen next year--if the rain didn't fall. It's not whether I'll be able to buy a new coat, it's whether I'm going to live. The ceremony was a norm in their lives.

John: I don't think that's any excuse to kill your child.

Sarah: Yes, but did they hurt anybody else? It was their own children, their family. It's very hard to judge.

Apparent in this excerpt is the students' struggle to achieve an open-minded stance in the face of cultural values that are different from their own and that are, at times, repugnant to them. Further, the students reveal a variety of attitudes towards a foreign value system, owing to the variety of their cultural backgrounds and life experiences.

Notable in this discussion is a pattern of point and counterpoint among the participants. We hear a series of assertions, yet there is little attempt at consensus; no one student offers an argument of accommodation, although the group leader assumes a supportive attitude throughout, often questioning a student or providing a paraphrase. Such a pattern emerged because one student held a deeply-felt view, backed by the authority of religious conviction. No argument could dissuade her. Restrained and polite, other students counterargued. Finally, one student, seemingly inattentive to the discussion at hand, came alive to assert an absolute view: "I don't think that's any excuse to kill your child!"

How might the group dynamic have changed if the voice of authority had been the instructor's rather than a peer's? Those talkative and lively students would have probably met the instructor's unshakable view with silence. But given another mix of students working on the same task, another dynamic would have evolved, no less interesting, no less effective--just different.

Students came away from discussion with a cacophony of shared and opposing views, which they were free to sort out and then commit to writing.

Student Writing Samples

I chose to offer the module to two sections of English 112. Class A had a more homogeneous composition; for the most part students came from the Richmond area, and there was no more than five-years' difference in their ages. Class B had greater variety: two students from Panama and Lebanon, three students of Greek heritage, and three returning adults, two from the South, one from New York State.

There were as many reactions revealed in the essays as there were students writing, though the classes addressed the project in two distinct ways. To find a writing topic, the students in Class A needed parallels for their readings of the Head excerpt found in other, more objective sources. Understanding that limitation, I helped them write their papers from the site of their own power, hoping to empower them further rather than thwart them with my expectations. For example, students compared the famine in Botswana to the Kurdish refugee crisis (spring 1991). One student used the drought as a starting point to focus on the global environment, centering his discussion on the Brazilian rain forests. This student had rejected discussing the human relations described in the Head short story, feeling more comfortable writing about a more objective issue.

Another student, who plans to join the Peace Corps after obtaining her B.A., projected herself into the story as a Peace Corps worker who tries to work with the community to circumvent the crisis: planning new methods of irrigation, building reservoirs, and learning about food storage and preservation.

Students in Class B, on the other hand, grappled with the underside of human behavior that Head was asking us to consider, as well as with notions of faith and religious conviction, relative and absolute viewpoints about religion, and definitions of religion and superstition.

One student compared the theme of religious faith in both excerpts:

These two stories show the different ways faith affects us. In for colored girls, there is a helping, healing faith that gives a person the strength and confidence that is needed to solve problems. In "Looking for a Rain God," there is the blind faith that is reached for in desperation and usually gives people more troubles instead of helping them solve the ones that are already present. The one good aspect of faith in "Looking for A Rain God" is that it comforted the Mokgobja family, even if only for a short time. Faith in a higher power is always comforting but it does not solve problems. The only thing that solves problems are people; the level of faith we have just determines how difficult those problems will be to solve.

Many students in Class B noted the universality of the family unit, seen especially in the roles played out by the women which, they astutely noted, were acted out in play by the two little girls who would be designated for sacrifice.

While waiting for the rain to fall, the families "sat the whole day in the shadow of the huts and even stopped thinking" (Head 91). The little girls were not even aware of the turmoil that was mounting among the people of Botswana. They played "their game of making house...chattering to each other in light, soft tones" (Head 91). They acted as their mother did against them (by scolding their stick figure dolls).

Concerning the relationships between the men and women in the two excerpts provided, one student paralleled Shange and Head:

I feel [providing support] is a mutual thing between the man and the woman...The man may uphold the woman and exhibit strength. However, if the man is experiencing a stressful and sad moment, the woman can be his strength. [In Head's story], the women "started a weird, high pitched wailing that began on a low, mournful note and whipped up to a frenzy (Head 91). [But] "the men sat quiet and self-controlled (91)." It was important for the men to maintain their self-control at all times. They knew the women were haunted by the starvation of the coming year (91)."
In contrast to the weakness of the women in "Looking for a Rain God," much strength is portrayed by a woman in Ntozake Shange's for colored girls. Crystal is a strong woman who is the mother of two kids. Crystal is harsh at times when she needs to be and doesn't let Beau get the best of her. She lets him know what a fool he is and remains strong, unlike the "wailing" women in Bessie Head's story.

Finally, focussing on the Head short story, one student in Class B grappled with the troubling family decision to take up the ancient religion and perform human sacrifice:

What a society accepts as their norms often determines the behavior of its people. A society's culture defines what one society finds acceptable and another finds unacceptable. Often, our religious norms are created by what we think a higher authority has decreed to us as a society.
In some past cultures, events occurred accidentally that were interpreted by a few; in turn, (these few) convinced the masses of the legitimacy and truth of the event to dictate what then became a generally accepted belief. When this occurs, even something so horrible as killing two innocent children can become acceptable for a higher cause.

This student is developing a sense of cross-cultural perspective. When the sequence of reading, discussing, and writing was concluded, she approached me to say (with a radiant expression and evident emotion): "You didn't teach me anything, but you expanded me." Overly sensitive, I felt my pedagogy had fallen short for her, Yet she felt that she had been amply compensated by the affective aspects of her experience with course material. However satisfying it is to gain a new perspective, for some students, learning means acquiring technical information which one files away for future tasks. In Class B, discussion was prompted by affective and philosophical issues. In Class A, students felt less competent and therefore less willing to approach open-ended inquiries. In each case, the special ingredients of the group created a dynamic of its own, initiated, built upon, and controlled by the participants.

Conclusions

Students often learn best without direct teaching. This places a special burden on an instructor to be not only expert in content but also ingenious and inventive in engaging students through a variety of strategies which foster peer autonomy and independent learning.

By participating in autonomous peer discussions followed by writing workshops where peers shared drafts, students enriched their own ideas and added insight to their essays. On the other hand, I may have asked students to work with subject matter too unfamiliar to them, expecting them to make the same connections I did between texts. I would have been truer to my beliefs about teaching and learning had I allowed students more space and freedom. I think I could have accomplished these ends by offering a selection of stories by Bessie Head. In the end, some students leaped to new awareness of other cultures, others hopped and skipped along the way, but no one stood still.

Works Cited

Head, Bessie. The Collector of Treasures. Portsmouth, N.H.: 1997.

Herber, H .L. and J. Nelson,"Questioning is Not the Answer," Journal of Reading. 1975: 512-517.

Obradovic, Nadezda, ed. Looking For A Rain God. N.Y.: Simon & Schuster,1990.

Shange, Ntozake. for colored girls who have considered suicide, when the rainbow is enuf. N.Y.: Macmillan, 1977.

Beverly-Lynne Aronowitz is an Assistant Professor at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, Parham Road Campus, Richmond, Virginia.

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