Teacher Education and the Cultural Imagination: Autobiography, Conversation, and Narrative -Susan Florio-Ruane (223)

OK, so I didn't pick this book up for fun and randomly choose to read it. Yeah, it's required. But it's cool! It's about a bookclub.

The researcher is interested in teaching teachers about culture. Most of us realize that the way we're taught about multiculturalism is a load of donkey manure. In those workshops or classes, the cultures are presented as static, as if reading an article written by an outsider I can now say, "I am an expert in *** culture."

Florio-Ruane looks to narratives for understanding culture, particularly autobiography. She gets six volunteer student teachers to meet at her house once a month (she bought the books and fed them dinner) to discuss different autobiographies dealing with culture -

• Vivian Paley's White Teacher (love her),
• Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (great book, love her),
• Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation (fantastic book - one of the best I ever read),
• Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory (BLECH! What a freaken WHINER - nobody loves me, I'm always an outcast, blah blah blah),
• Jill Ker Conway's The Road from Coorain (haven't read), and
• Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary (hate it, really).

Learning about culture and understanding its effects on students is not possible in a staff development day - it's a long, difficult process that involves examining our own culture and biases. And interesting.

And I realized (again) how cool our bookclub is. We are so interested in other cultures, and we dig in without the presuppositions that could really inhibit our understandings. We're cool. It's fun. And I hope it's reflected in how we deal with our students.