Chapter 6: “I Contain Multitudes”: Embracing Complexity With Monologues in the ELA Classroom

Understanding different perspectives is an essential skill in almost every discipline. In ELA, for instance, students read stories with characters whose perspectives may closely mirror their own or diverge dramatically from anything they’ve previously known. In social studies courses, students explore a variety of often contrasting and challenging historical, anthropological, or psychological perspectives about a topic to draw conclusions and synthesize new arguments.

While it can be somewhat easy for students to recognize these other perspectives—to see that a character lives in a different country or to notice that a historical document was written in a different time period—it can be exceedingly difficult to teach students how to truly understand, empathize with, and articulate the complexities of a perspective—that is, to see it fully and not merely as a pale imitation or caricature—especially if it is a perspective with which they disagree or know little about.