Teaching Mockingbird

By Facing History and Ourselves

Teaching Mockingbird presents educators with the materials they need to transform how they teach Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird.  Interweaving the historical context of Depression-era rural Southern life, and informed by Facing History’s pedagogical approach, this resource introduces layered perspectives and thoughtful strategies into the teaching of To Kill a Mockingbird.

This teacher’s guide provides English language arts teachers with student handouts, close reading exercises, and connection questions that will push students to build a complex understanding of the historical realities, social dynamics, and big moral questions at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird. Following Facing History’s scope and sequence, students will consider the identities of the characters, and the social dynamics of the community of Maycomb, supplementing their understanding with deep historical exploration. They will consider challenging questions about the individual choices that determine the outcome of Tom Robinson’s trial, and the importance of civic participation in the building a more just society.

Teaching Mockingbird uses Facing History’s guiding lens to examine To Kill a Mockingbird, offering material that will enhance student’s literary skills, moral growth, and social development.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Facing History and Ourselves
• Release date: Nov 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940457086

Facing History and Ourselves

Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational and professional development organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. By studying the historical development of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide, students make connections between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives.

Book preview

Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational and professional development organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. By studying the historical development of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide, students make the essential connection between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives. For more information about Facing History and Ourselves, please visit our website at www.facinghistory.org.

Copyright © 2014 by Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved.

Facing History and Ourselves® is a trademark registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Cover art credits: Rural home image, General Research and Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Young girl image, Martin Barraud, Getty Images. Both images reproduced with permission.

ISBN-13: 978-1-940457-08-6

ISBN-10: 1-940457-08-4

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

— spoken by Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

In memory of Judge Howard M. Holtzmann (1921–2013)

who, like Atticus Finch, was an honorable man.

Acknowledgments

Primary Writer: Daniel Sigward

Facing History and Ourselves is profoundly grateful to Jill Garling and Tom Wilson for their outstanding support, which will ensure that teachers, students, and communities globally may access this resource. Thanks to Jill and Tom’s leadership, generations of readers will be encouraged to use this resource to draw the connection between the choices made by the characters in Harper Lee’s classic novel and the moral and ethical choices each of us confronts throughout our lives.

Facing History also extends special gratitude to the Holtzmann/Richardson family for their generous support.

Developing this guide was a collaborative effort that required the expertise of numerous people, and many Facing History and Ourselves staff members made invaluable contributions. The guide would not be possible without the guidance of Adam Strom from start to finish. Laura Tavares played a critical role as a thought partner with Dan Sigward and reviewer of his early drafts. Margot Stern Strom, Marc Skvirsky, Marty Sleeper, and Dimitry Anselme were a thoughtful and supportive editorial team. Karen Barss, Denise Gelb, Michele Phillips, Steven Becton, Jocelyn Stanton, Stephanie Richardson, and Lisa Lefstein-Berusch also provided critical suggestions and feedback throughout the guide’s development. Catherine O’Keefe, supported by Ariel Perry, Andrew Phillips, and additional editorial and design consultants, attended to many details that transformed the manuscript into this beautifully polished publication. Alexia Prichard, Wilkie Cook, and Liz Kelleher also require acknowledgment, as they developed the website and companion videos. Brooke Harvey, Anika Bachhuber, Lara Saavedra, and Samantha Landry also helped move the writing and production processes forward in countless ways. The project would not have been possible without the work of Lori Rogers-Stokes, Cyrisse Jaffee, and Rhonda Berkower, who drafted early versions of the guide. Many thanks to Facing History’s communications and external affairs team for creating and implementing the outreach plan about this important initiative.

Introduction

What Did You Learn in School Today?

Margot Stern Strom, Executive Director, Facing History and Ourselves

To Kill a Mockingbird is set in a small town in Alabama in the 1930s, a town much like the one in which author Harper Lee came of age. Although I grew up a generation later, I see much of myself in Scout, the young white girl who narrates the book. Like Alabama in the 1930s, Tennessee in the 1950s was a place where separate never meant equal. It was a place where colored water fountains did not spout brightly colored water as a child might expect, but stood as symbols of the dogmas of racism, which meant indignity, shame, and humiliation for some and indifference, false pride, and hate for others.

At school my teachers carefully avoided any mention of race, class, or gender. Like Scout, I learned those lessons from my family. When Scout comes to her father with questions about human behavior, he doesn’t give her advice on what to say or do. Instead, he tells her that the trick to understanding another person is to consider things from his or her point of view. For nearly 40 years that has been the work of Facing History and Ourselves. We trust students to wrestle with complex choices in the past and present so that they will better understand the social mores of our time. We encourage them to think critically and independently in much the way that Atticus, Scout’s father, engages his children.

Like my teachers, Scout’s teacher misses an opportunity to trust her students with the complexities of history and human behavior. In one lesson, a child, Cecil, shares his current event: the fact that old Adolf Hitler has been prosecutin’ the Jews. Miss Gates stops him to correct his choice of words; it is persecuting, not prosecuting. Cecil shrugs off the correction and describes how Hitler’s puttin’ ’em in prisons and he’s taking away all their property and he won’t let any of ’em out of the country.

Another child asks how Hitler can just lock up people without the government stopping him. Miss Gates replies, Hitler is the government. And then, seizing an opportunity to make education dynamic, she prints DEMOCRACY in large letters on the chalkboard and asks for a definition. Scout responds by reciting an old campaign slogan she learned from her father: Equal rights for all, special privileges for none. Miss Gates smiles her approval and prints WE ARE A in front of the word DEMOCRACY on the chalkboard. She then tells the class that this is the difference between America and Germany: We are a democracy and Germany is a dictatorship. She goes on to say, Over here we don’t believe in persecuting anybody. Persecution comes from people who are prejudiced. And she enunciates the word: Pre-ju-dice.

When a student asks why the Germans don’t like Jews, Miss Gates says she doesn’t know the answer but perhaps it’s because they are a deeply religious people and Hitler’s trying to do away with religion. At this point, Cecil offers another explanation. He tells Miss Gates he doesn’t know for certain, but the Jews are supposed to change money or somethin’, but that ain’t no cause to persecute ’em. They’re white, ain’t they?

Miss Gates responds by shutting down the discussion. Surely she knows, as most people did at the time, that Hitler was persecuting Jews because he claimed they belonged to an evil and inferior race; but race is a forbidden subject in a community where Jim Crow is part of the fabric of society. So Miss Gates decides to ignore Cecil’s question and move on: Time for arithmetic, children.

Scout spends the rest of the period looking out the window, convinced that school is irrelevant. It doesn’t help her reckon with the prejudices that inflame the community during the trial of Tom Robinson, an African American her father defends in court after Robinson is falsely accused of raping a white girl.

It is at home that Scout and her older brother, Jem, begin to confront the injustice done to Robinson and begin to acknowledge the racism that defines their community and underpins its legal system. When Jem expresses his anger at the jury that convicted Robinson, Atticus tells Jem that if he and 11 other boys like him had been on that jury, Tom would be a free man. He goes on to say of the actual jurors:

Jem mutters that those facts don’t make things right; his father agrees. He reminds the boy that the one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments into a jury box. Atticus tells Jem and Scout that someday there will be a bill to pay for the injustices, the violence, and the persecution.

That day has not yet come. As a result, Scout and Jem are attacked by a white man because their father defended a black man in court. In the end, the children are saved by Boo Radley, a neighbor who is a recluse. Scout and Jem have always imagined him as a monster who threatens small children. By the end of the book, they discover that he has been quietly protecting them at a time when their father could not. After saving their lives, Mr. Arthur (as Scout now thinks of Boo) allows the young girl to walk him home. As they reach his house, Scout realizes her father was right to tell her that you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Later that evening, Scout decides that she and her brother would eventually get grown, but as a result of their experiences with the trial and with Boo, there wasn’t much left for them to learn at school, except possibly algebra.

When Harper Lee’s book was published in 1960, it became an overnight sensation. Courageous African Americans were bringing issues of race, fairness, and simple justice to the attention of the nation and the world by appealing to the conscience of all people everywhere. The discussions they inspired are at the heart of a democratic society—one that truly strives to provide equal rights for all, special privileges for none, one that insists on a square deal for every individual in its courtrooms and every child in its classrooms. To Kill a Mockingbird is as relevant today as it was in 1960; there have been significant gains, but we still have a way to go. These issues are at the heart of a Facing History and Ourselves classroom.

Using This Resource

Teaching Mockingbird interweaves a literary analysis of the text with the exploration of relevant historical context, allowing students to engage in a richer, deeper exploration of the themes of growth, caring, justice, and democracy at the heart of the novel. This approach develops students’ literacy skills, as well as their social-emotional skills and competencies. It closely aligns with the instructional shifts encouraged by the Common Core State Standards and is informed by Facing History’s unique pedagogical approach, grounded in adolescent and moral development.

The resource is organized into seven sections, following the journey, or scope and sequence, that shapes every Facing History and Ourselves course of study. Students begin with an examination of the relationship between the individual and society; reflect on the way that humans divide themselves into in groups and out groups; dive deep into both the text of To Kill a Mockingbird and the history of the American South in the 1930s; and then explore the legacies of both this classic novel and the injustice it captures. This guide also includes resources to help students understand moral growth and development and apply those principles to both the characters in the novel and their own lives.

Section Elements

In addition to Pre- and Post-Reading sections, the guide is made up of five core components that support the reading of specific chapters. These components include:

•  Introduction

»  Essential Questions: the important themes that will be emphasized in both the novel and the materials included in the section.

»  Rationale: the thematic focus of the section and how it connects to both important literary elements in the novel and the historical context.

»  Plot Summary

»  ELA Skills Focus

»  Academic Vocabulary List

•  Exploring the Text, containing resources to guide students’ close examination of the novel and reflection on its themes.

»  Before Reading: brief activities and journal prompts to initiate student thinking about important themes to follow.

»  Using Connection Questions: primarily text-based questions designed to deepen students’ understanding of the novel and to prompt reflection on its themes. Questions are provided for each chapter, as well as a culminating set to help students think about the section as a whole.

»  Activities for Deeper Understanding: suggestions for writing, reflection, and close reading activities that engage students in deep consideration of important Facing History themes and literary elements in the novel.

•  A Building Historical Context segment, featuring activities that use primary and secondary source documents, films, images, and other resources to help students understand the historical context that influences the world of Maycomb, Alabama, which is not made explicit in the novel.

Introducing the Central Question

As you and your students progress through your study of To Kill a Mockingbird, we recommend that you use the central question to connect classroom discussion and activities back to the larger themes of the novel.

What factors influence our moral growth? What kinds of experiences help us learn how to judge right from wrong?

When we discuss moral growth in this guide, we are referring to the development of each individual’s ability to judge right from wrong. This process comprises one of the core themes of To Kill a Mockingbird. As the story unfolds through the eyes of Scout, the readers watch her and her brother, Jem, come of age in a society whose mores are at odds in crucial ways with the conscience of their father, Atticus. All three Finches—Scout, Jem, and Atticus—are confronted with their community’s beliefs about race, class, and gender, and they must figure out how to be both individuals and members of their society. As students explore the ways in which the characters negotiate these tensions, they will have the opportunity to reflect deeply on how all of us grow and mature as moral people.

We recommend that you introduce this question before beginning your unit of study on To Kill a Mockingbird and revisit it in your class reflections and discussions throughout the unit. The Post-Reading section includes an assignment