Chapter 4

I took a class in grad school about identity development though literature and this chapter brought me back. I wish it were a little more in-depth but this whole text is looking at critical literacy at a surface level anyway.

I do believe that literature has the potential to define one's identity and students can learn to analyze themselves and others by reading a text. I liked the Bearstone lesson because the teacher provided outside reading to fill in blanks students were bound to have on the subject. Without this additional information, they would have a hard time knowing the context for the characters and the history that determines how and why they're doing the things they're doing in the story. Often students' experience is limited, so we have to keep that in mind when asking them to interpret a character's actions, thoughts, feelings, etc.

I thought the concept of exploring identity from this chapter could be applied to a number of different fiction stories in the textbook. A nonfiction text might include "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall..." and I could certainly use the concepts when talking about the identities of Kenny and Byron in Watsons... before the character analysis paper. What I didn't like was that it really didn't get into understanding identity at all. While the activities were good starters, the authors really didn't give any meat to this aspect of identity.

I have a few texts that I am going to look at to see how we might do this better. There's a lot more to identity that what the book suggests and I need a different resource.