Collaborative "Life Stories" and Anonymous Team Journals: Fostering Dialogue and Decentering Authority in the Classroom

Abstract

ACCORDING TO HENRY GIROUX, AN EFFECTIVE MULTICULTURAL PEDAgogy motivates students to engage diverse voices and perspectives without lapsing into a homogenized brand of American pluralism.' Introducing college students to Native American literature requires multiple points of reference to dislodge stereotypes of American Indians imparted by the dominant culture (from Hollywood films to New Age shamans) and to reflect the variety and complexity of American Indian cultures and worldviews.2 For many students, reading American Indian literature becomes a first-time lesson in history and geography. Additionally, as students grapple with testimonies of the painful legacies of colonization -such as histories of genocide, forced assimilation, or Indian removal -they need access not only to critical interpretative tools but also to affective and subjective modes of response. Cultivating diversity in the classroom is not enough. We also need to offer students ways to apprehend the uneven power relations that shape both American Indian literature and familiar, canonical, or popular traditions of American history, biographies, and fiction. The following pages focus on two writing projects that promote classroom dialogue and diversity on one hand and problematize or unsettle some issues of authority on the other. The collaborative life stories exercise and anonymous team journals allow students to share their varied, sometimes intensely emotional and conflicted responses to the reading and, at the same time, to think critically and reflectively about how to negotiate between conflicting stories and alternate histories.