Kursplanung

Pedagogy of Interruption

From:  Choo, Suzanne. “IB Diploma Programme: Research to Inform Curriculum Review--Incorporating Global Issues in Literature.” International Baccalaureate, 2016. 11.

The following approach is described by Mr K’s curriculum centred on two important themes. The first theme was cross-cultural identity and students studied a range of texts including Ang Lee’s film Eat Drink Man Woman, Jamaica Kincaid’s On Seeing England for the First Time, Kyoko Mori’s The Dream of Water, and Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter. Common in all these texts is the notion of cultural displacement, clashes, and mixing whether this occurs through colonization or migration. In one assignment, students answered questions such as “Examine how Lee explores the idea of cross-cultural identity through his craft” and “Compare and contrast two extracts you studied this year (Tan, Kincaid, or Mori) for how they explore the issue of cross-cultural identity.” Questions pushed students to relate these texts to their own experiences such as: “Use one of the text extracts you studied this year (Tan, Kincaid, or Mori) to talk about your own sense of cross-cultural identity”.

One approach Mr K adopted in his classes was a pedagogy of interruption. In one unit centred on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, he had students conduct scene by scene close analysis. After a number of lessons into the play and after he felt students had sufficiently discussed the development of the key issues, he interrupted this process by having students read another short story “On Discovery” by Asian American writer Maxine Hong Kingston. The story is about a male figure who chances upon a land ruled by women and then undergoes a process of feminization. After analyzing the story, Mr K asked students to apply the concept of taming a person that they learnt in Taming of the Shrew, to the story. He pushed students to think about how Kate in the Shakespearean play was similar to the male protagonist in Kingston’s story in that both are made to conform to society’s idealized image of a female object. The intent was to foster new cultural understandings so that students would become aware of how gender identity was perceived in 700 BCE China in which Kingston’s story is set as compared to 16th-century Italy in which the Shakespearean play is set. Students then became more conscious of the similarities and differences of male chauvinistic ideas and objectifications of women across different cultural and historical contexts.

In subsequent lessons, Mr K continued this approach of weaving in and out of his teaching of Taming of the Shrew by introducing other texts, especially culturally hybridized texts such as those by African American writer Toni Morrison, Caribbean American writer Jamaica Kincaid, Chinese Singaporean writer Stella Kon, and Japanese American writer Kyoko Mori. The point was to help students understand that all texts are culturally constructed and situated and to challenge them to resist what Nigerian-American writer Chimamanda Adichie (2010) terms, “the danger of the single story.” To Mr K, students should be aware that themes and issues such as the treatment of women must be investigated from multiple cultural points of view. Studying a literary text, even a canonical one, only provides one perspective and therefore needs to be interrupted by another text that offers a different cultural interpretation. In this way, students learn to negotiate differences and appreciate ambiguity in values.