Wallace 1

Multi-Genre Text Set

Ajae Wallace
November 2010
CI 519; SSM: Language Arts
Professor Beth Herman-Davis

Grade Level: 10th grade

Central Text: Lee, Harper To Kill a Mockingbird[AW1]

Multi-Genre Text List:

Genre/Type of Text / Author. Title. Source (when applicable).
Poetry / Toomer, Jean. “Reapers” and “Portrait in Georgia”
Hughes, Langston. “Mother to Son”
Dunbar, Paul Lawrence. “We Wear the Mask”
Audio / Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Poets.org <
Video / Angelou, Maya. “Still I Rise” <
Chu, Jon. “Silent Beats” <
Film / Foote, Horton (screenplay), Lee, Harper (novel) “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962)
Music / Holiday, Billie. “Strange Fruit”
Grand Master Flash. “The Message”
Common. “The People”
KRS-One. “Hip Hop”
Biography/Autobiography / Levine, E. Freedom’s Children. NY: Putnam, 1993.
Graphic Novel / Love, Jeremy. “Bayou” and “Bayou vol. 2”
Website / Scottsboro: An American Tragedy. PBS American Experience. <
Image Gallery (video) / Wallace, Ajae. <

Essential Questions:

  • How do our experiences change the ways in which we understand and react to the world?
  • How does America’s history with race and racism correlate to our current experience with -isms?
  • What kinds of difficulties have you faced in your own life—where have they come from (self or outside)—how have you/do you overcome difficulty in your own life?
  • What do the following terms mean? How are they related—how are they different—what do they mean to you?
  • Fairness
  • Right Action
  • Justice
  • Ethics
  • Morality

Rationale:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is novel packed thick with thematic elements that connect with the current experiences of adolescent students and concepts that capitalize on the stage of cognitive development that occurs at this time in a youth’s life.It doesn’t take much looking to find texts that will help draw out and make more real the universal and personal connections that we want students to take away from this text. However, because there are so many wonderful, pertinent things to learn from this novel (and I couldn’t tackle creating an exhaustive list of supporting texts), I will be focusing primarily on texts that will expand upon issues of racism, violence, stereotypes, laws and ethics while developing students knowledge of the elements of literature as well as developing proficiency with different forms of literature or text.

I imagine the texts in a multi-genre list or set as being in mutually-affective relationships with each other while drawing out the themes and elements from the inner most central text through the ring of supporting text so that they can come into relation with personal experience, and finally coming into effective interplay with the outermost ring of the world at large or the “big picture”:

Central Text

Supporting Texts

Themes and Elements

Personal Experience

The “Big Picture”

At the center of this multi-genre text set is To Kill a Mockingbird (TKaM). As I mentioned previously,the content of TKaM makes it especially fruitful as a central text; however, it is also useful to build a text set around a novel because of the variety of themes and issues that can be present in one work, the ability to use the text to teach literary elements (such as plot, setting, character, and so on), and the length of the reading allows students to become practiced in reading and analyzing texts of greater length than they may feel inclined to experience otherwise.

It is a fact that there will be students present in the classroom who are reluctant to engage with a novel. This may be due to any number and combination of reasons, including reasons such as not liking the teacher, having a negative past experience with literacy, wanting to look cool for a peer group that doesn’t value books, learning difficulties and disabilities,feeling intimidated by so many pages, or not possessing a self-image as a reader. However, I believe at the heart of any student’s reluctance to engage with a book is a kind of fear developed from lacking in exposure,scaffolding, and appropriate guidance.Because instructional methods are not the focus of this paper, I will illustrate how the texts in a multi-genre text set can be used to increase exposure to literature and act as a kind of scaffolding or in-roads to a weightier central text. In order to better highlight the relationships among the individual texts and how they tie into the overarching thematic learning goals I have for the students, I will follow the essential questions as prompts for the study of this text set.

How do our experiences change the ways in which we understand and react to the world?

The character development of the children in TKaM, especially that of Scout, progresses throughout the book from a very childish perspective of the surrounding world and events to a more complex, aware, and actively developing perspective.It is likely that most high school sophomores have limited knowledge of the era in which TKaM is set. We can help guide them from a lack of knowledge toward a more complex, developing understanding quickly through the use of visuals; the first step in this process is to expose students to images from the era of the Great Depression. I have created an animoto video (not out of hubris, but in an effort to create a simple, introductory compilation of images only) that follows a sort of visual timeline from the end of WWI to the beginning of WWII in America. Included in the video are images such as flappers, musical or literary figures, soldiers, Jim Crow signage, lynching, bread lines, dust bowl devastation,rural and urban occupations, political figures and propaganda, health issues, women’s issues, and even an image of the inception of the great American hero, Superman. This video will create the basic matrix over which students can begin to lay their complex understanding of the central text and the relationships among the texts. After the basic matrix has been laid, it may be useful to do a metacognitive study of how our experiences influence our understanding through listening to (and then reading) the poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes. Hughes’ reading of his poem includes an introduction in which he explains how his own perspective and understanding of the rivers that lined his own geographical landscape changed as he became more aware of the significance they played in his current and historical cultural experience. The instructional emphasis on visuals and audio to introduce the central text will reduce text-size anxiety, make the themes from TKaM more readily apparent to struggling or reluctant readers, and aid in comprehension of the setting and characters in the novel.

How does America’s history with race and racism correlate to our current experience with -isms?

One of the main topics in To Kill a Mockingbird is racism; however, sexism also features importantly in a literary analysis of the novel. Racism and gender inequality are as prevalent today as they ever have been—though in new forms. The short video “Silent Beats” is an especially good in-road to talking about racism and sexism through its contemporary examination of how we react based on cultural and racial stereotypes.Other texts that serve as useful in-roads to an examination of our past and current experiences with –isms are the poems of Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Maya Angelou. Putting the selected poems in relation with the songs of Billie Holiday and the selected Hip Hop artists (Grand Master Flash, Common, and KRS-One) will further emphasis the connections between our historical and contemporary experiences with racism and sexism. I selected the poems and songs to reflect artists from both eras—Maya Angelou and the Hip Hop artists are contemporary, while Toomer, Hughes, and Holiday are from the era under study. I incorporated music into the text set for various reasons, such as appealing to aural learners. However, one of the more significant reasons I think it is important to incorporate music is because many students are unfamiliar with poetry—it appears to them as some sort of higher (and therefore unattainable) form of literature, yet music is a familiar part of everyday life for most teens. An effective way to ease anxiety and bring students to poetry is through explicitly showing that lyrics are poetry.

What kinds of difficulties have you faced in your own life—where have they come from (self or outside)—how have you/do you overcome difficulty in your own life?

Creating the opportunities for students to connect personally with the themes of the central text is another crucial component in allowing students to associate with the characters and issues in the central text and developing a deeper, more permanent knowledge and understanding. Like the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird, every student has had personal struggles, experiences with feeling like or being treated like an outsider, and have developed strategies to persevere through tough times. Part of my agenda as a teacher is to create opportunities for students to reflect upon their own lives and ways of interacting with the world in a manner that serves to “shine a light” on the skills they have developed to move their lives in a more positive direction so that they may call upon these skills more easily and with greater mastery. It is imperative that a student relates to the characters in the texts they are studying even if they cannot relate to the specific circumstances. A teacher can facilitate this by drawing out universal themes and through using supporting texts to help the students to see themselves in the position of the characters in the central text. Easily-relatable themes such as struggle, hope, tensions between personal and public identities, overcoming adversity, and striving for cultural integrity can be found in the poems “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes, “We Wear the Mask” by Lawrence Paul Dunbar, in the video and poem of “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou, and in the lyrics of “The People” by Common and “Hip Hop” by KRS-One. Another way to foster personal connections is to feature protagonists who are adolescents themselves so that students can literally see themselves in the role of the characters. The central characters of the following texts are teens and youth: “Silent Beats” (video);“Mother to Son” (poem); Freedom’s Children (autobiography); Bayou volumes 1 and 2 (graphic novel); and, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy (website). To further aid in comprehension and connection with the texts, Bayou is a graphic novel that will appeal to most students especially those who may struggle with extrapolating themes from a larger body of print.

What do the terms fairness, right action, justice, ethics, and morality mean? How are they related—how are they different—what do they mean to you?

The climax of To Kill a Mockingbird is then courtroom scene during which the approach to matters of ethics and law during the historical period of the story become predominate in the story. In order to scaffold a higher-order analysis of these topics and help students understand how real-life influences literature, it will be useful to further invest the students in the content of the central text through a study of a real-life trial that may have been one of the inspirations for the trial in TKaM. The defendants in the Scottsboro trial were a group of black teenage boys who were accused of raping two young white women; these accusations are very similar to the accusations of rape against Tom Robinson. The PBS website that features the trial is loaded with visuals and a timeline as well as narrative accounts of the events surrounding the trial.

An examination of the Scottsboro trials within the context of TKaMand the other supporting texts willenable students to fully round-out the learning goals for the course as illustrated by the multi-genre text set diagram. Students will come to develop a more complex and lasting understanding of the historical issues and universal themes contained within To Kill a Mockingbird—making more informed, critical, heterogeneous, and personal connections and analyses—as theytravel back and forth across genres and time periods on the in-roads to knowledge created by different types of text.

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