The element of the "High School Students' Responses to Alternative Value Stances Associated with the Study of Multicultural Literature" that distinguishes it from other articles on teaching multi-cultural literature is that of decentralizing the ideology of white dominance in the school setting and in analyses of literary characters.

Allow me to connect the article with Fresh Girl: a high school classroom would need to discard their socially "white" ideas of behavior because the classroom depicted in the novel is consists primarily of African American, Haitian, and other minority characters. For a classroom that is highly segregated, but is inherently based on a social/racial hierarchy of the orderly, competitive White social type on the top, it would take some new thinking to understand a minority classroom such as the one in Fresh Girl. Conversely, it can be considered that given the absence of white students, other cultures take on the dominant social role, such as the more financially successful African American students, who top the social hierarchy, often looking down on those like Mardi who are "fresh off the boat." White students discussing this book may relate to these equally dominant characters, despite the different in race, because they relate in certain areas of their social roles and behaviors.

However, socially dominant White students may also relate most to Mardi because of her academic competitiveness; despite the disadvantage of coming to New York speaking Creole, she teaches herself English at an intensely impressive rate and scores top grades on all of her English assignments. This article showed to us that White students tend to value competitiveness when they don't fully consider the institutional frames that affect how characters act above an individual level, feeling that all races should compete on an equal level.

A teacher teaching this book would have to understand these limitations of analytical thought, even if the classroom in question is racially diverse. The teacher would have to realize how each race would analyze and judge a character and his/her behaviors, and work to make the students take a step back and consider things outside of this fixed and racially-blind discourse of how adequate characters should act.