Bridge across silence: journal writing as a means towards understanding the color purple and addressing the silences around multi-cultural experience in a classroom

Abstract

With the emergence of South Africa as a new democracy and the concomitant new constitution there has been interesting and subtle change in the context in which I teach. The composition of my classrooms has changed and thus I have used journal writing by the students to try to deal meaningfully and transformatively with these changes. My classroom had within a relatively short space of time, become a multi-cultural one in which silences, different from those I had previously noticed, emerged. [No abstract provided. Information taken from introduction].