Beyond Mirrored Worlds: Teaching World Literature to Challenge Students' Perception of "Other" by Kiran Subhani Qureshi

Teaching literature to students has always proven to be a difficult task for me. When you have a variety of readers in your classroom ranging from advanced to severely below average, selecting any piece of literature is going to be a challenge. How can you assign literature when there is such a variety of reading levels? You don't want to bore the advanced students, and you surely don't want to make the readings so difficult that your average or severely low students will become frustrated and give up. I thought my literature issues were trying until I read the article by Kiran Subhani Qureshi. Kiran experiences as a high school English teacher after 911 encouraged her to develop a literature course called Global Voices. She designed this course to help students challenge their assumptions, values, and lifestyles. Global voices purpose is to break down harmful stereotypes of Asian, African, South American, and European cultures. Due to 911 and the fears associated with it, caused many to formulate negative imagery produced by the media. Kiran's course of actions caused students to shake stereotypes and to look at the literature to see actually see it for themselves. I like how she structured her class so that one continent was the concentration piece aligned with a thematic unit. In the beginning she felt that students were not engaged in the course because of the responses she would receive from them during class discussions. However, she could tell the literature bothered them because they couldn't meet her eyes and really tell here what they thought of the literature they were reading.Whenever something is disheartening or uncomfortable, we tend to look away, not wanting to associate with it. She taught her students that becoming a global citizen begins with our ability to endure discomfort. She showed them how to examine the literature instead of reacting to it. Kiran had her students revisit difficult passages and urged them to examine the words and envision the images the authors so painstakingly and purposefully to address the essential questions. Articles such as this gives hope to many English teachers. Being a Muslim high school teacher after 911 posed a difficult task for Kiran, but she still overcame her obstacles and set out to bridge the gap between American cultures and other foreign cultures through literature.