Inquiry Post #1

QUESTION: How might we help students with diverse cultural backgrounds make their own personal cultural connections with the relatively un-diverse worlds of the ever-growing in popularity dystopian fiction genre? Do we even need to try to foster these connections?

Dystopian fiction is becoming more and more popular with Young Adult readers. I admit that I have read only a small sampling of this genre; however, I am a bit dismayed to have come across perhaps one minority character and I have yet to encounter a Black character at all. I teach in a predominantly Black and Latino school, and a great number of my students are reading these books. In what ways can we make cultural connections so that students are able to "see themselves" in other ways in these works?  My students are often attracted to the stories these novels have to offer, and they think less of how they can connect to the book beyond enjoying the story. Perhaps I should be asking if my students even need to make these types of connections--if it is perfectly okay that they take much satisfaction in the story and need nothing else.


Again, I have to admit that I have no idea how to really begin figuring out a real answer to these questions. I did not have much success with my first round of looking for research on this, but I will keep searching and return this post at a later time.  I do not want to be the teacher who takes the fun out of something because I press the students to see big pictures that they really do not feel a reason to see on their own.  However, I do feel like it is part of my job to help my students make connections that go beyond the books. From my reading perspective, I see really interesting connections to be made between these YA dystopian novels and, say, classism and/or colonialism more broadly and  real-life, historically based racial/ethnic struggles. I think that encouraging students to locate and think about these types of connections will not only enrich their reading of the particular novel, but it will also add a new dimension to their thinking about their own cultural backgrounds and the backgrounds of others.