Creating New Meanings and Understanding with Postcolonial Texts: Teaching Purple Hibiscus in a Grade 10 Classroom

This article invites readers to share the experiences of a teacher and his Grade 10 students as they read and discussed Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Nigerian novel Purple Hibiscus. The novel was selected as part of a national action research study in which literacy researchers and teachers select postcolonial literature for the classroom and develop new pedagogical strategies for teaching the texts. The article suggests that contemporary international novels such as Purple Hibiscus have potential to raise complex questions of social justice in the classroom and to create new understandings of a changing world.