I posted a link to Teach Like a Champion before. Here's another extract, for Lulu:
"Content is one of the places that teaching is most vulnerable to assumptions and stereotypes. What does it say, for example, if we assume that students won’t be inspired by books written by authors of other races? Or by protagonists of different backgrounds than their own? More specifically what does it say if we are more likely to assume those things about minority students? Do we think that great novels transcend boundaries only for some kids? Consider the novelist Earnest Gaines’s description of the authors who inspired him to write. Gaines, who wrote several of the most highly acclaimed novels of the twentieth century, including Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Lesson Before Dying, and A Gathering of Old Men, grew up poor in rural Louisiana on the same land his family had share-cropped for generations, He was the eldest of twelve children and was raised by his aunt—the kind of kid to whom some might ascribe a limited worldview, probably without asking, and to whom few would assign a diet of nineteenth-century Russian novelists. Yet Gaines recalls: “My early influences were…the Russian writers such as Tolstoy, Turgenev and Chekhov. I think I’ve also been influenced by Greek tragedy, but not by Ellison and any black writers. I knew very early what it was I wanted to write. I just had to find out a way to do it and the…writers whom I’ve mentioned showed me this way.”
Let me say that I love Ellison, just as I love Gaines, and am not suggesting we not teach his work (to all students incidentally). But imagine the loss not just to Gaines but to all of us if the teacher who first put Turgenev in his hands and inspired the spark of genius to grow into a flame had looked at the color of his skin, assumed that Gaines wouldn’t find interest in anything so foreign, and thought better of Turgenev."