New documentaries connect with Raisin and Mockingbird (Part 2)

The other documentary we recently discovered is the four-part series The Loving Generation, which features interviews with individuals who were born to interracial couples in the 20 years following the 1969 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision, which ruled anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.

Our unit in Using Informational Text to Teach To Kill a Mockingbird features an excerpt from the Loving decision to help students make sense out of the character of Dolphus Raymond in chapter 16. Just as Scout doesn’t understand why Raymond lives the way he does, students today are likely unaware of the Loving decision, the anti-miscegenation laws it overturned, and the effects of both that extend to the present day. Any episode in the series would provide an engaging hook into this unit (perhaps along with a clip from the recent dramatization of the Lovings’ story).

The first episode, “Census,” introduces Loving v. Virginia and focuses on the reflections of members of The Loving Generation on their mixed-race parentage and how that influenced how they identify themselves personally and publicly.

In the second episode, “We Are Family,” the interview subjects speak about how race was dealt with within their immediate family and on their relationships with both sides of their extended families, especially in the era of Trump.

“Coming of Age,” the third episode, captures the interviewees’ thoughts about how being biracial affected them socially during their school years. This episode is particularly promising as a springboard for discussion with students about growing up amid the sociocultural politics of mixed racial heritage in the U.S. today.

The fourth episode, “The Obama Era,” confronts the idea that, with the election of Barack Obama, America entered a post-racial era. It also focuses on what the election of a biracial president meant personally to members of The Loving Generation, especially now that so many of them are parents themselves raising multiracial children of their own.

The 10-12-minute length of each of these episodes makes them easy to incorporate into a class period, and they are enormously timely and relevant subjects of discussion in ELA or social studies classes in their own right. However, we think these episodes have particular value to teachers who are striving to make connections between To Kill a Mockingbird and the present day.

We are always on the lookout for new connections to the books we love to teach not only because it builds timely relevance for our students, but it also reinvigorates our teaching. Furthermore, it models for our students the critical disposition of paying attention to the world and looking for new ideas and connections to help us understand and navigate our everyday lives. And it’s so much fun!

New documentaries connect with Raisin and Mockingbird (Part 1)

Finding engaging multimedia to hook students’ interest is often our favorite part of working with informational texts. And we’re always excited to find a new audio and/or visual clip that offers our students a new way into the informational (and literary) texts we love to teach. So we were very pleased to discover two recent documentary efforts that connect wonderfully with A Raisin in the Sun and To Kill a Mockingbird: a biographical piece on Lorraine Hansberry and a series on The Loving Generation.

“Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart” is a beautiful tribute to the life, work, and activism of Lorraine Hansberry. The two-hour documentary features an impressive range of evocative still images and film footage of life on the southside of Chicago and in Harlem during the 1930s and 1940s, any part of which could be used to help students contextualize the challenges the Younger family faces in A Raisin in the Sun.

The first part of the film focuses on Hansberry’s father, his rise as a real estate owner on the southside of Chicago, and his attempt to move his family to a white neighborhood, a deliberate challenge to the restrictive covenants that barred African-Americans from purchasing property there. This ultimately thwarted attempt at desegregation and how this defeat affected her father served as the inspiration for Hansberry’s landmark play.

Hansberry’s sister movingly describes the violent intimidation her family faced after moving into the previously all-white neighborhood. Her recollections, accompanied by photographs of the protests outside of and attacks on their home, and voiceover narration from excerpts of Hansberry’s diaries, create a deeply moving depiction of these events. Hansberry’s recollections illustrate the significance, not only for the Hansberry family, of the legally enforced restrictions that circumscribed the socioeconomic opportunities of African-Americans.

This section of the film would serve as a dramatic introduction to a discussion of the violence often associated with housing desegregation. The film clip would dovetail wonderfully with the excerpt of a report by the city of Chicago on the violence that followed the desegregation of a housing development on the far south side in the 1950s, which we feature in our volume Using Informational Text to Teach A Raisin in the Sun. Both underscore the historical context for the housing discrimination that persists today and that make Raisin a continuingly relevant play for our students. (Our volume on Raisin features units on housing discrimination both past and present.)

Also of interest to teachers of Raisin is the documentary’s focus on the difficulties Hansberry and her producers faced in getting A Raisin in the Sun to Broadway and on the impact of its enormous success on African Americans who finally saw their daily lives depicted on stage. The latter is particularly interesting in the context of the present-day, record-breaking box office success of Black Panther and discussions of how long it has taken and how meaningful it is for an African-American superhero to make it to the big screen.

However, while the success of A Raisin in the Sun on stage brought Hansberry a great deal of acclaim, it did not mean the end of her struggles to protect her work. While Hansberry won the battle to write the screenplay for the film version of Raisin, she had to fight continuously against studio efforts to “water down the race material,” and was only moderately pleased with the final result. (See our volume on Raisin for further discussion of Hansberry’s struggles on this front.)

The end of “Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart” focuses on Hansberry’s life after Raisin, particularly her activism within the Civil Rights movement, which was curtailed, like her creative work, by the extended period of illness preceding her death from pancreatic cancer at the age of 34. It also sensitively addresses the contradiction between Hansberry’s outspoken public presence as an artist and activist and her private life as a closeted lesbian married to a white man who helped maintain her secrecy. While not directly relevant to the teaching of Raisin, the conclusion of the film provides the opportunity for rewarding discussion of the contradictions and conflicts people encounter in their lives and how they choose to face them.

Note: the full-length “Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart” documentary is available to PBS/Thirteen members for streaming via the American Masters website, but educators can access shorter clips for free via the PBSLearningMedia website.

Check back soon for Part 2 on The Loving Generation ...

Invoking Mockingbird, Obama reminds us of importance, difficulty of empathy

In his Farewell Address on January 10, 2017, President Obama once again charmed and pleased many English teachers across the United States with his reference to Atticus Finch and To Kill a Mockingbird.

In case you missed the moment, Obama said, “if our democracy is to work in this increasingly diverse nation, then each one of us need[s] to try to heed the advice of a great character in American fiction – Atticus Finch – who said, `You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’”

This passage, a favorite for many teachers, comes at the beginning of Chapter 4, when Atticus describes the practice of climbing into another’s skin, or what we might today call radical empathy, to Scout as a “simple trick” (39). The current political moment suggests there is nothing simple about it.

Indeed, Obama acknowledges in his Address the difficulty and rarity of this act of empathy. He presses Americans to “pay attention, and listen … acknowledging that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t vanish in the ‘60s.” Obama insists that we also need to work to tie the “struggles for justice to the challenges that a lot of people in this country face … [including] the middle-aged white guy who, from the outside, may seem like he’s got advantages, but has seen his world upended by economic and cultural and technological change.”

The allusion to Mockingbird seems a perfect exemplar for Obama’s point and for our current political moment. Tom Robinson and Calpurnia live in a desperately unequal world. In Maycomb, their lives are simply worth less; they are disempowered and dispossessed.

But so too is Mr. Ewell. Scout as narrator in Mockingbird explains that the “families like the Ewells” (227) inhabit every town like Maycomb. They are people left behind by both good times and bad: “No economic fluctuations changed their station – people like the Ewells lived as guests of the county in prosperity as well as in the depths of a depression” (227).

Just as Atticus never really steps into Tom Robinson’s skin and imagines the world from his point of view, the plight of the Ewells, who actually live in “what was once a Negro cabin” (227), is never tied together by anyone in Maycomb as part of a broader struggle for justice in the novel. One might say that the two disempowered characters live in their separate bubbles, until their worlds collide. Mr. Ewell is the antagonist, of course, but both characters suffer, disproportionately of course, from their place in the world of Maycomb in which they are not seen by the broader society or by each other.

Obama’s Address asks us to do what is definitively NOT a simple trick: to see each other and all those who are interconnected with us; to listen to each other and have real dialogue, rather than stay in our bubbles or snipe at each other over social media.

For those of us teaching Mockingbird, this is one more moment in which we can use informational text – in this case Obama’s Address – to show students the relevance of the literary texts we teach and to cultivate in our students the skills, disposition, and courage to become engaged, informed citizens. 

Using 'Loving' to teach 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

There’s lots of talk about the recent film Loving, directed by Jeff Nichols, and starring Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as the interracial couple who triumphed in the Supreme Court over Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws. It’s a sweet film, and one that takes an intimate approach to the subject in a way that is sure to be embraced by teachers. Loving contrasts the quotidian events of rural life and love with the broader politics of racism in the United States in a way that mostly charms, even if it is somewhat frustrating in its deliberate focus away from the Civil Rights Movement.

In an interview with NPR, Nichols discusses how he first became aware of the story of Richard and Mildred Loving and their battle with anti-miscegenation laws in Virginia when he was introduced to the HBO documentary on the Lovings in 2012. Nichols says, “[F]or that to be the first time that I heard about Richard and Mildred Loving was kind of unacceptable to me. I think this is something that people more than just law students that have taken constitutional law classes, you know, should have a familiarity with, especially now.”

We couldn’t agree more. So many of our nation’s signature Supreme Court cases are unknown to the people of our nation. And many of the decisions, like Loving v. Virginia, are actually relatively accessible and deeply engaging. They certainly are readable by, as Nichols writes, “more than just law students.”

In fact, we think many Supreme Court cases make terrific, engaging companion texts to some of our most commonly taught literary texts.

For example, we use an excerpt from Loving v. Virginia in Using Informational Text to Teach To Kill A Mockingbird. The case serves as the informational text-center of our unit, “What’s Up with Mr. Dolphus Raymond?” Studying Loving v. Virginia gives students the legal context with which to understand the fact that the white Dolphus Raymond could not legally marry the African-American mother of his children. Scout may or may not be aware of this prohibition, which makes it all the more inaccessible to students today. Reading Loving v. Virginia together with Mockingbird reveals the deeper gravity and historical resonance behind Raymond’s drunken masquerade. Nichols’s Loving surely deserves a place in our classrooms as well (even just the 2 1/2 minute trailer for the film does fine work in unpacking for students the taboos against interracial marriage).

Indeed, reading Mockingbird together with Loving v. Virginia is one way, we think, in which the Common Core helps us engage students in “difficult conversations” (Chadwick 91) about race, class, and social injustice. Jocelyn A. Chadwick references these “difficult conversations” in her excellent discussion of teaching Huckleberry Finn in the November 2016 issue of English Journal. Her essay forms one of several companion pieces to Peter Smagorinsky’s provocative essay on whether it is “time to prohibit Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn” (75).

Leaving aside the issue of teaching Huck, one issue that struck us in the debate in EJ was Smagorinsky’s worry about the Common Core’s “emphasis on reading within the four corners of the page while sublimating emotional responses in service of textual analysis” (80). This worry seems to echo earlier concerns that the Common Core would force English teachers to put aside literature in favor of instructional manuals.

The Common Core, however, asks us to broaden, not narrow, our students’ reading. Students are sometimes asked to read “within the four corners of the page,” but the Common Core also introduced the informational text standard and emphasized the important skill of putting different kinds of texts into critical conversation. Anchor Standard 9, for example, asks students to “Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take” (CCSS, 2010). Explicitly, this standard articulates a reading practice in which students use multiple texts to build an “informative context” that expands beyond any singular close examination of a solitary text.

Particularly for texts like Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn, that informative context can be just as important as the emotional context. Emotional responses to literature can and should retain a place in our classrooms, but we also have a responsibility to help place those responses within the complex and politically difficult historical context that students often can’t access from the literary text alone. After all, Scout and Jem think Dolphus Raymond is a drunk because they have no context within which to understand his actions and behavior. Informational texts, like Loving v. Virginia and Nichols’s Loving, make sure our students don’t make those same mistakes. These companion texts to Mockingbird are crucial tools for us to use in meeting the Common Core Standards, building literacy across a range of text types, and facilitating difficult but critical classroom conversations.

Day 1 at NCTE Minneapolis (where it’s very cold)

Getting ready for our packed session on "Teaching To
Kill a Mockingbird in (Not-So) Post-Racial Times"

We arrived bright and early in the morning from New Jersey. One of our first highlights was Brian Sweeney’s discussion of how his high school journalism student was able to turn a quirk in the New York City sexual education policy (teachers could talk about condoms but not actually show them) into a breaking story about policy change that was picked up by national media. Sweeney’s talk was part of a panel about writing forms beyond the essay and student agency. It was an inspiring way to begin our NCTE.

Next, we presented our work on informational text and Mockingbird. The panel, Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird in (Not So) Post-Racial Times was the brainchild of Susan Groenke (thanks to her for that!). We were thrilled to talk to an informed and lively audience about ways to think about Calpurnia and Lula vis-à-vis an audio interview of Dorothy Bolden, who worked as a domestic for 41 years and founded the National Domestic Workers Union in 1968, and excerpts from “Growing Up White,” featuring the reflections of white women who grew up in the 1930s South, like Scout, on the nannies and sharecroppers of their childhoods. If you missed our presentation, our slides are available on our website, as is the unit we focused on, “What Does Scout Really Know About Calpurnia?”

Robert Prickett followed us, with wonderful examples of graphic novels featuring African-American characters and history. We can’t wait to read Jennifer's Journal: The Life of a SubUrban Girl and the many others. Our favorite takeaway from his talk: use just a few panels from these various text to fill in context, make connections, and enrich your classroom discussion of Mockingbird.

Next, Stacy Reece and Susan Groenke talked about their research on pre-service teachers and the teaching of Mockingbird. Their qualitative research on how these students had been taught to read and think about Harper Lee’s novel – Atticus as hero, for example – was so compelling, especially given how universally the students talked about the erasure of race in their experience of the novel in high school.

Their next task was to help these pre-service teachers design lesson plans that would foreground an anti-racist pedagogy. What was so striking about this work was how challenging it was for these young teachers to imagine this work. All new teachers worry about how to handle conflict in the classroom; inviting a politically challenging discussion of race into your classroom is no small feat for a new teacher. But if we don’t help these teachers to think about this work now, when will we? We need our new teachers to take on these challenges; we can ill afford another generation of students who read Mockingbird as an unqualified tale of white heroism.

Thanks also to a great audience for their feedback. There’s no question that Mockingbird remains a problematic text today. Yet we know it remains one of those universally taught texts, so our challenge is to teach it well in combination with other texts that allow our students to have the difficult and informed conversations about race that we need to have in our classrooms.

Finally, we closed our day at a session entitled, “Responding to College Readiness,” featuring Audrey’s colleague, Caroline Wilkinson, along with Susannah Kilbourne and Hollye Wright. This highly interactive session allowed for great discussion of the vexed and vexing topic of college readiness. We did not, as one disappointed audience member noted, leave with the “answers” as to what constitutes college readiness and how to achieve it. But we did take away a sense of the importance of continuing conversations about the academic and non-academic skills necessary for success in college, the academic and non-academic obstacles (particularly poverty), and the difficulty of ensuring real access and opportunity for so many first generation students.

All in all, a great day at NCTE, as usual.

Supporting success for all students with complex informational texts

Audrey had the opportunity to work with a former student and current high school language arts teacher Ms. D. this past week. Ms. D. has been working with Using Informational Text to Teach To Kill a Mockingbird, so it was great to collaborate on Loving V. Virginia, one of the units in the volume, in her classroom.

Ms. D.’s focus, as she explained, had been reading comprehension. She used media clips suggested in our volume and focused her attention on sidebar questions to guide her students’ responses to the key ideas and textual features within the informational texts. For Ms. D., the fact that her class included a majority of students with IEPs, made the task of working with complex texts all that more daunting, but she had been enjoying teaching Mockingbird through the many lenses our informational text units provided.

Audrey began her visit with a video showing a live performance of Nanci Griffith’s song,“The Loving Kind,” from YouTube. After an initial viewing, the students were able to glean that Richard and Mildred Loving were an interracial couple who had made history and changed our nation. But they had little sense of the broader issues. They could understand that the two had been jailed for marrying, but they offered some confused responses about how people generally might have been happy about their wedding or about the fact that their relationship might have been prohibited because of slavery.

So we watched the video a second time, and Audrey asked the students to think about key words and phrases. They shouted these out as we watched, and Audrey jotted them on the board. They noticed, for example, that the song referenced how Richard and Mildred had changed the “heart” of our nation and we talked about the significance of that word “heart” as opposed to, for example, the “laws” of the nation (which provided a nice tease for Loving). The focus on the word “heart” also helped them think about how and why the “heart” of the nation might have needed to be changed in relationship to this love story and more broadly how “hearts” can remain unchanged even when laws change.

Next, Audrey moved into vocabulary. Because Ms. D. hadn’t done much work on vocabulary before, we worked slowly, first in groups and then collectively only on the vocabulary exercises involving context clues and usage (we skipped over the dictionary work). This took time, but the students were able to gain understanding of crucial key ideas and words within the court case as well as build confidence and skill at working with context clues to derive word meanings.

This vocabulary work is so important to our work with informational text. Building skill at deciphering context clues and at gleaning information from short, knotty passages is crucial to student success. Our vocabulary questions can be considered mini practice texts; building reading fluency in small groups and then collectively with these small examples allows the student to take on the longer, challenging informational text.

During the 90-minute class, we also spent a good bit of time talking about the introduction to, the title information for, and the opening sections of the Loving decision. The students struggled to understand many of the basics: why Justice Warren was writing the decision; what did it mean for the decision to be unanimous? We also talked about how the Lovings could be guilty of violating the Virginia statutes but still win their case in the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds (and how a win in the Supreme Court is different from a win in, for example, traffic court).

A highlight of the class was when we worked through a block quote in the Loving decision in which Justice Warren quotes the trial judge’s opinion on the case: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

The students were totally confused about this quote, in part because of its format as a block quote and the way in which Justice Warren introduces the quote into his opinion. Justice Warren writes, “He states in an opinion that….” For the students, the “he” in this quotation was Warren himself. When Audrey asked them why Justice Warren would quote himself or why he would call himself “he,” they were flummoxed. The fact that Justice Warren does not name the lower court judge here no doubt added to the confusion.

But once some careful probing allowed the students to discover that Justice Warren was quoting the lower court judge (and the judge who had suspended Mildred and Richard’s one-year sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia and “not return together for 25 years”), the students were able to demonstrate their brilliance. The idea that this lower court judge would invoke the Bible, but without actually quoting any scripture, was typical, the students asserted. People use God to make all sorts of arguments, they said; that doesn’t make the arguments necessarily true, but it does fool some of the people. Indeed.

So these students may have been confused about when slavery ended, how the Supreme Court functions, and how to unpack the complicated use of a block quote within a legal argument, but they could, with some gentle assistance, make some fairly astute comments about the disconnect between what’s legal and what’s real in practice and about how religion is often invoked to bolster specious arguments.

The Loving opinion is one of the more challenging units in our Mockingbird text, precisely because it involves difficult legal language, complex vocabulary, and a general understanding of our country’s legal system. Students may come to the text without being fully equipped, but we can still make them feel smart about their ability to have valuable insights, even with their incomplete background knowledge. And when they feel smart, they are more likely to persevere and keep working at complex texts, which will produce in them both more background knowledge and greater investment and insight into our anchor text, Mockingbird, where Dolphus Raymond, alas, could not and did not marry his love and the mother of his children.

Etiquette and being a good neighbor

This past week I had the opportunity to sit in on part of a 90-minute block 9^th grade English class taught by one of my colleagues at University Academy Charter High School. I was particularly eager to visit her class because I knew she was planning to use materials from our Using Informational Text to Teach To Kill a Mockingbird unit on etiquette and gender roles.

The teacher began the class by leading the students in briefly reflecting on the previous days’ discussion on what it means to be a good neighbor. They had used the graphic organizer from our unit on Roosevelt’s inaugural address to reflect on which characters in the novel exemplify “the policy of the good neighbor” that Roosevelt references in his speech.

Until that moment, I had never realized how well that activity would segue into the unit on etiquette, which I had perceived as applying particularly to chapters 9 or 13 in connection with Scout’s dealings with Aunt Alexandra and especially to chapter 24 when Scout attends the missionary circle meeting.

But now I saw how she had hit upon a great thematic connection central to the novel and very relevant to her students’ present-day lives: social expectations (particularly of women) and how we get along with one another. The often-unwritten social values and expectations a community holds in common and how they influence the way people interact with and perceive each other is a strong current throughout the novel and one that persists to this day. And so I was especially eager to see how the class would proceed.

The teacher began with one of the media clips we suggest – a funny 1950s instructional video on dating dos and don’ts available on YouTube – in order to hook the students' interest. (There was a funny moment when the teacher at first accidentally clicked on the next video in the playlist, a 1950s instructional video on “How to Undress in Front of Your Husband”!) The students were amused by what they perceived as the relatively stiff and formal behavior of the teens in the dating film and compared the etiquette of the dating process as depicted by the film to how teens interact with each other today. While they observed that the dating process is far more casual now, particularly as facilitated by social media, they also acknowledged that women today still face sharp judgments based on how they act and dress and whether they are perceived to “respect themselves.” However, the female students also emphatically stated that anyone they might date would have to accept them for who they are,

The teacher used the students’ comments to segue into the essential question of the etiquette unit: Does a girl have to be a lady? The students offered their definitions of what it means to be a lady. The teacher then asked if they knew what etiquette means. One of the female students was able to make sense out of the term by describing her experience attending a cotillion.

The teacher then introduced the excerpt from the etiquette guide, explaining that it had been published not long before the time in which Mockingbird is set. She read aloud the introduction to the excerpt and drew the students’ attention to the discussion questions alongside the reading, explaining that the questions should signal to students how and when they might need to adjust their rate of reading to make sure that they fully understand the text.

Unfortunately, at this point, I had to leave to teach my next class. But the teacher later showed me the students’ annotations and comments they had written alongside the text in response to both our guided reading questions as well as their own discussion. It was gratifying to see that the students had engaged so deeply with the text – and made so many meaningful connections between Mockingbird and their own lives – with their teacher’s excellent guidance.

In our conversation following the class, the teacher said she appreciated the flexibility of our units: activities for each informational text that can be undertaken at any point in the study of the novel or in relation to particular chapters that are directly relevant. This flexibility allows teachers to move back and forth between Mockingbird and the different units. Indeed, my colleague said she planned on going back to some of the other activities on the good neighbor and etiquette as the class gets further on in the book. Meanwhile, the discussions the students had this week laid valuable groundwork in terms of allowing students to make insightful connections and build background knowledge; they are ready for chapter 24 when they will see how Scout has to negotiate both the prescribed gender expectations and rather un-neighborly behavior by some of the ladies at the missionary circle meeting.

Using informational videos to engage students in complex texts

If Frank W. Baker helps us think about how useful theatrical visuals can be in teaching the close reading and careful analysis skills critical to understanding literature (like To Kill a Mockingbird), we need to remember that informational videos can be just as helpful as we take on both literary and informational texts in all of our classrooms (not just in language arts).

For example, we used a brief Associated Press clip about Guantanamo Bay from YouTube to remind our young students about the connections between Al Qaeda, Guantanamo Bay, and 9/11 before teaching an editorial (an informational text) by Stephen Jones (published in The Wall Street Journal) about his experience defending Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. (Note: If your school or district blocks YouTube, there are browser plugins that allow you to download videos to your desktop. This is a good practice to follow in general; since the video file will already be on your desktop, your lesson won't be at the mercy of any video streaming glitches.)

The editorial, about the importance of good defense for politically unpopular clients, helps students see Atticus’s defense of Tom Robinson in Mockingbird as part of a continuing debate about whether everyone deserves a good lawyer. But while the article provides accessible background about Timothy McVeigh (whom the students haven’t heard of), it assumes background knowledge about Al Qaeda and the Guantanamo defendants (which is only fuzzily present in our students’ brains).

And as with many texts that can seem remote and unexciting, the Jones piece has no obvious hook for students. Why should they care? How can they find an entry point into the text?

We used a quick, engaging clip from the AP (1 minute) about the conviction of Bin Laden’s driver to create that hook and set the stage. After the clip, we asked a few leading questions about the clip. Did they think the driver was guilty of serious terrorism charges or was he just a driver? Did they think he could get fair treatment through the military tribunal system, or did they wonder, as did his defense attorneys, about the issue of a fair trial? Students can be used to watching media passively, so presenting the initial questions to them can be key in getting the discussion going. And sometimes, it’s important to show a video clip more than once (or repeat the clip after you’ve asked the leading questions). It’s easy to forget how much is going on even in a brief media clip, with visuals, various voices, as well as information that’s unfamiliar to our students.

In our lesson, after the brief discussion of the AP clip (about 3 minutes), the students were quick to condemn the driver as guilty and dismissive of the concerns about a fair trial and even legal defense for people like Bin Laden’s driver. The clip and the discussion set the students up to take a stand and they did.

Unlike Baker, our goal with the media clip wasn’t to cultivate close reading and critical analysis. It was to prime the students with some basic information and get them to feel invested in the topic, which was achieved when they took a personal stand.

Once the students had taken their stand, they were set up for success with Jones’s editorial, which argues precisely the opposite point. The informational text, at this point, wasn’t remote and abstract to them. The media clip had allowed them to form an opinion about the issue, and they were ready to read more. And of course, more reading allowed them to refine and reformulate their earlier ideas and to see connections with Mockingbird.

So, use media clips to prime your students with background information and motivation -- especially with challenging informational texts!

Using the language of film to engage students in visual and literary texts

We are always looking for ways to get our students more engaged with the texts we are reading. And we all know teachers who rely on the film version to motivate students (and sometimes reward students for plodding through the book). But turning out the lights and sticking in the movie (and offering the film as dessert) can be a recipe for trouble.

Frank W. Baker offers some great alternatives in a new post, “How to Close Read the Language of Film” on MiddleWeb. Apropos of To Kill a Mockingbird, he suggests offering students two publicity stills from the film and asking students to think about camera angles, clothing, and positioning, all in order to gain insight into the characters, particularly their power and their class position.

In effect, the film stills become stand-alone texts, challenging, rich with meaning and ripe for analysis, but also more inviting and less intimidating for students. Close reading these visual texts empowers students, prepares them for the media challenges we know are ahead of us with the Common Core, and is a richly rewarding exercise in critical thinking.

Imagine beginning your unit on Mockingbird with a discussion of either of the stills Baker suggests, so that even before they start reading, your students have a sense of Atticus’s relationship to the Maycomb community!

We strongly believe in the power and potential of media in the classroom and find Baker’s suggestions and tips really helpful.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for our thoughts on using informational videos to hook your students into complex literary and informational texts!

Using Informational Text in the Classroom: Atticus and the 'Case for Unpopular Clients'

In late December, we used some of our material with a 9^th grade class at Secaucus High School. The students had read through chapter 24 (when Scout, during Aunt Alexandra’s missionary circle, learns that Tom Robinson has been killed in prison). We decided to work with them using our unit based on Stephen Jones’ 2010 piece from the Wall Street Journal: “The Case for Unpopular Clients,” which appears in our forthcoming book, Using Informational Text to Teach to Kill a Mockingbird, available from Rowman & Littlefield Education in March. (This unit isn’t available online, but you can see and download two other Mockingbird-based units at www.usinginformationaltext.com.)

Jones defended Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and his editorial is a heartfelt defense of the lawyers working with detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The piece is ripe with connections to Mockingbird, but it’s challenging because it articulates a complex argument, uses advanced vocabulary, and assumes a relatively large amount of background knowledge.

The Secaucus 9^th graders, however, showed how much they could do in a fifty-minute period!

We opened the period with a quick video clip from YouTube. The students, after all, had no idea what Guantanamo Bay is, so they had no way of thinking about the issue of defending the accused terrorists there. The one-minute clip about the trial of the driver for Bin Laden (whom they had heard of) gave them some context. In a quick discussion after the clip, the students asserted that really guilty people shouldn’t necessarily get a lawyer because this might allow them to get off. We talked a bit about how you would know whether someone was really guilty without a trial and that shook their confidence, but we didn’t yet raise the issue of the importance of a trial for all defendants.

Next, we moved to some vocabulary exercises. Although we suggest you begin the vocabulary work with context clue activities, we started with vocabulary skits in part because we were visiting the class and wanted to build in some immediate fun and goodwill. The students responded well although they struggled, as can be expected, with parts of speech, confusing, for example, adversarial and adversary. (This unit is not available online, but other sample units showing the range of our vocabulary materials from our Using Informational Text to Teach To Kill a Mockingbird can be found at www.usinginformationaltext.com.)

We did a few more vocabulary exercises, using only those that involved context clues since we didn’t want to spend the time focusing on dictionary skills and use. The work was painless and engaging and allowed us to begin to set the stage for some of the issues in Jones’s piece.

After about 20 minutes of prep work, we got to the meat of our work: reading through and discussing Jones. We read together, using the sidebar discussion questions we had placed alongside the excerpt to chunk the text, probe understanding, and draw connections with Mockingbird. The first paragraph of the article references Timothy McVeigh, whom the students hadn’t heard of, but that same paragraph lays out pretty simply how brutal his bombing of the Federal Building was. As Jones sketched out his reasons for defending McVeigh, students were able to deepen their understanding of the American justice system, appreciating Jones’s willingness to defend a guilty and unpopular client, noting the similarities to (and difference from) Atticus and Tom Robinson, and rethinking the importance of a zealous defense for all accused (and refining their earlier opinions about Bin Laden’s driver). A particularly great moment was when the students considered how comparatively well Atticus had been treated by his community given his unpopular defense work. Jones notes death threats and armed guards at his home; when the students continue on and read to the end of Mockingbird and the attack on the children, they will be able to reflect back on their preliminary assertions.

In all, the fifty minutes of class was wonderfully successful in getting them to think about the continued relevance of the issue of a fair defense for all. The students read difficult text, learned some new words, and thought carefully about some tough issues. We didn’t get through everything (and perhaps could have cut the text into a smaller chunk that served the singular purpose of our one class period), but reading Stephen Jones’s informational text allowed the students to flex their reading and critical thinking muscles while also delving deeply into Mockingbird.