Using Purple Hibiscus to Explore Identity and Injustice

These surveys ask students what they know or how they feel about specific words in the text they are reading.

Challenge the Text helps students ask and answer their own text-dependent questions by taking multiple perspectives and uncovering assumptions and biases within the text.

In reading against the grain students analyze the dominant reading of a text and engage in alternative or "resistant" readings. Resistant readings scrutinize the beliefs and attitudes that typically go unexamined in a text, drawing attention to the gaps, silences and contradictions.

This strategy exposes students to multiple short pieces of a text before they read it in its entirety. Students read selected quotes out of context and comment on both the selection and the comments of other students. The activity ends with students reflecting on their reactions to and predictions about the text.

This task helps students consider if the text is a window or a mirror through practicing literacy skills and using technology.

A strategy to introduce the anti-bias framework into group discussion and textual analysis. Students respond to and pose questions from the four anti-bias domains: identity, diversity, justice and action.

A discussion strategy that asks students to infer how a particular author or character from a text would respond to questions and scenarios. Students must defend their conclusions using evidence from the text.