Straddling the Cultural Divide: Second Generation South Asian Canadian Secondary Students Negotiate Cultural Identity Through Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates the experiences of second-generation South Asian Canadian students in secondary English classrooms as they encounter the contemporary postcolonial text and film entitled The Namesake (Lahiri, 2003; Nair, 2007) and discuss cultural identity through reader response. The three main questions this study addresses are: What does it mean to re-think how we teach English language arts through a postcolonial lens? In what ways do cultural identities affect how and what we read/view? How does text selection affect a students’ sense of cultural identity? Framed by ongoing debates regarding the continued dependence on the Western literary canon in contemporary secondary classrooms (Johnston & Mangat 2012; Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, 2004), this study is timely because for the first time in Canadian history, South Asians are now the country’s largest visible minority group (Statistics Canada, 2010). This study is framed by transactional theory, postcolonial literary theories, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories of identity. Pertinent literature on postcolonial literary theory and critical multiculturalism reveals that the connection between literature and the students’ cultural world needs to be further explored (Bannerji, 2000; Spivak 1999). The seminal works of Bhabha (1994), Said (1990) and Spivak (1999) have yet to be fully applied in educational contexts, thus constituting a gap in curriculum theory limiting the current scope of theorizing around the impact of cultural identity on reading and viewing experiences (Shariff, 2008). I used a case-study approach with seven South Asian Canadian students in an English 20 IB and an English 30 class from a large urban Western Canadian high school. Using qualitative data analysis (Campbell, McNamara & Gilroy, 2004) the data suggest the value of using contemporary postcolonial texts in a high school English language arts classroom for helping South Asian students to address and make sense of issues pertaining to the complex nature of their bicultural identities. This research addresses the need for a more critical understanding of Bhabha’s (1994) liminal notion of identity. My study extends his ideas in order to better understand the struggles of young people in their evolving cultural and national identities, and the implications of these struggles for literacy activities and text selection in English language arts classrooms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".