Read Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird for Free Online Page A

civil rights, including no references to the Montgomery bus boycott, one reference to Brown v. Board of Education , one reference to the murder of Emmett Till, and three references to the rape trial of the Scottsboro boys.
    The emerging tendency in the teachers’ answers to explore the presentation and transmission of unchanging and universal “truths,” particularly the central idea of learning to distinguish between good and evil—coupled with the emerging tendency among the teachers’ answers to discuss the novel without solid grounding in the period in which the story is set and/or the novel is first published—may have the effect of transforming the complex novel To Kill a Mockingbird into a simple and timeless morality tale. Such an approach runs counter to trends in critical literacy and literary theory, which seek to question, reevaluate, and contextualize a work rather than transform it into something universal and removed from the world in which it is produced, circulated, and read. The final sections of this essay define the term “critical literacy,” review the working sample of teachers’ statements about Lee’s novel for evidence of critical engagement with the novel and with the students to whom the answers are largely addressed, and finally draw several conclusions and make several recommendations about how teachers talk to students about To Kill a Mockingbird .
    Defining Critical Literacy
    â€œCritical literacy” is a recent theoretical term that is used mostly in the context of secondary education—see, for example, the cited essays by Margaret C. Hagood and by Maureen McLaughlin and Glenn De Voogd—to describe the skills needed to read any given “text” (whether it be a printed novel or television advertisement) in more ways than one and to explore how the meanings of texts are constructed. In developing critical literacy in the middle school, high school, and first-year college classroom, teachers are to guide their students past an initial decoding and comprehension of the text’s surface content toward a fuller understanding of how dominant and alternate readings may be performed on a single text. Discussions of critical literacy frequently use the terms of literary theory, from “reader response” to “deconstruction,” and the goals of literary theory instruction seem to match the goals of critical literacy instruction: the student should come to understand the role played by the perceiving subject in the creation of meaning for a given text and appreciate the potential for radically diverging readings of the same text. Thus, at the risk of oversimplification, critical literacy is defined in this essay as a form of instruction in literary theory—modified, of course, for application in the middle school, high school, and first-year college classroom.
    Also recent is the publication of a number of resources that may be useful to teachers wishing to explore how to integrate theoretical perspectives and critical literacy into their teaching of Lee’s novel. The year 2007, for example, saw the publication of both Marie K. Smith’s Teaching Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” from Multiple Critical Perspectives , a resource complete with classroom activities and thus tailored specifically to the needs of the teacher, and On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections , a collection of essays edited by Alice H. Petry tailored to a university-level audience or higher that is interested in reevaluations of the novel through a variety of approaches. The recent teachers’ answers in the working sample and in the full collection of postings on To Kill a Mockingbird at eNotes.com give a sense of the extent to which such critical reevaluations of and teaching aides for Lee’s novel have influenced how teachers at the middle school, high school, and first-year college level talk to students about the