Considering the Audience for a Comprehensive Understanding of To Kill a Mockingbird
Main Article Content
Abstract
This essay seeks to show that the prospective audience for reading To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is students with a developed moral code who possess the ability to actively and accurately reflect on whiteness and how it lends to systemic racism and social injustice, likely students who are in their final years of high school or in a higher education institution. The primary focus of this essay is to consider how racism is taught and to whom, with a concentration on negating whiteness as a baseline, opposing the statement of looking at racism through a lens of colorblindness, and the importance of teaching racism in an age-appropriate manner.
Downloads
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
- Student authors waive FERPA rights for only the publication of the author submitted works.
Specifically: Students of Indiana University East voluntarily agree to submit their own works to The Journal of Student Research at Indiana University East, with full understanding of FERPA rights and in recognition that for this one, specific instance they understand that The Journal of Student Research at Indiana University East is Public and Open Access. Additionally, the Journal is viewable via the Internet and searchable via Indiana University, Google, and Google-Scholar search engines.
References
Borsheim-Black, C. “‘It’s Pretty Much White’: Challenges and opportunities of an antiracist approach to literature instruction in a multilayered white context.” Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 49, no. 4, 2015, pp. 407–29, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24398713. Accessed 24 Apr. 2022.
Lee, H. “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Perennial Classics, HarperCollins, 2002.
Macaluso, M. “Teaching ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Today: Coming to terms with race, racism, and America’s Novel.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, vol. 61, no. 3, 2017, pp. 279–87, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26631122. Accessed 24 Apr. 2022.
Niccolini, A. D. “Precocious knowledge: Using banned books to engage in a youth lens.” The English Journal, vol. 104, no. 3, 2015, pp. 22–28, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24484452. Accessed 24 Apr. 2022.