Christ and cleavage: Multiculturalism and censorship in a working-class, suburban high school

Gorlewski, Julie. (2008). Christ and cleavage: Multiculturalism and censorship in a working-class, suburban high school. English Journal,97(3), 26-30.

This article is really more about the kind of “text interrogation” characteristic of critical literacy than about multicultural teaching of literature in its usual sense. The author makes a case that her working-class suburban students are culturally discriminated against in schools, which privilege more white-collar middle-class values. That may be so, but I don’t see it truly as a cultural issue. The working class kids are still white and English-speaking, and that means privilege in U.S. society.

That being said, I was still intrigued by what happened in Gorlewski’s ninth grade class when she and her students noticed that the publisher of their literary anthology had actually censored the original texts to avoid profanity and cleavage. I like the way this provided an opportunity to show teenagers that they can challenge authority--though I do not know that any change probably resulted from it here. Like these students, I, too, was shocked at the censorship.