African Lit. In College Curric.

The following essay on integrating African American literature into the English curriculum begins with an introductory paragraph that demonstrates what occurs to the African American individual who is robbed of access when it comes to his or her own culture, heritage, and identity formation. The next paragraph discusses that one of the biggest obstacles to integrating African American literature into the English curriculum is changing the mindset of conventional educators who fail to see the enormous benefits of doing so not only just for blacks but for whites as well. The following paragraph argues that another major obstacle in getting African American literature into the curriculum is demonstrating to conventional educators that the values promoted and shared in African American literature may have been engendered in blacks through a different kind of social experience, but they are core values quite similar to white cultural values�honesty, perseverance, hard work, etc. The concluding paragraph argues that a further obstacle to the ready acceptance of African American literature into the curriculum is the fact that too many educators do not see how the lessons it teaches are quite useful in opening dialogues between black and whites and among blacks and whites themselves, dialogues which can be quite helpful in ameliorating some of our more pressing modern social ills.

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or her own culture, heritage and identity, but it also opens a dialogue between black and white children especially questioning assumptions and values of the mainstream culture. Further, like books by white authors, black literature is useful for helping teach lessons in other disciplines aside from English. Nonetheless, few teachers even seem to be aware of works written by black authors. As one educator whose school promotes black literature in the curriculum comments, "One of our tasks is to let classroom teachers in particular know that these books exist and to help make them available to students by incorporating them into the curriculum. Educators can use black literature to meet teaching standards in various subjects. In a lesson about math, for example, a teacher might use Dear Benjamin Banneker, a biography of the black mathematician" (Smolkin 2). One of the biggest obstacles to incorporating African American literature into the curriculum is convincing those who make that decision of its value and its similarity to white literature. White literature is often useful for educating and socializing students because of its values like honesty, responsibility, perseverance and others. African American literature revo

Category: Literature - A