ENGL 3400 March 10

Today I taught class. We looked at chapter five of Deborah Appleman's Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents & chapter nine of To Kill a Mockingbird. I overestimated the amout of stuff I'd have time to talk about. Here is a copy of my lesson plan. It's rough.

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March 10

Tell them my plan for what we’re doing today.
Pair Chapter 9 of To Kill a Mockingbird with Appleman Chapter 5

1.How student’s view female characters and appraise author’s stance towards them

What’s literally going on here? What’s figuratively going on?
What does this text suggest about the relationship between genders?
How does Scout / Finch’s Landing reflect reality?

How does her character reinforce or resist social attitudes toward women?
How are we implicated in this reading? Do we want Scout to be more lady-like?
So, what is the message in this text about gender?
Does the message about Finch’s Landing reinforce the message about Scout?

Multiple perspectives: Write a description of Scout from Aunt Alexandra’s perspective, Uncle Jack, Atticus, Jack, Francis, Scout.
Who might represent the traditional perspective? Who might represent a feminist perspective?
Traditional v. Feminist lists: (79 &80) Recasts the women as victims, passive. What is the effect of this? Is there a way to make these active? Is there a purpose to making them active? Might this encourage activism or bring feminism into present?

Analysis of Scout / House: situation, author’s intent, consider audience, and what meaning derived from text

2. From text to context: Read gendered patterns in the world
Can men only see things from a male perspective? How might the reader’s gender affect his or her reading?
How might we teach it? Act it out staging opposite gender roles? To get younger students to identify gender as an issue instead of just providing them with the focus.

Give an example of some thing in real life—outside of the text—and ask students to describe it from each character’s perspective.
Example: There’s only one male in this education class.

3. Can we link the message about gender to any other binary discrimination in the text? Racism? Classism? Is the message linked? Francis’s name-calling
How does Lee’s gender affect this text then? Identify her with black people


What is feminism? Have students generate a list of impressions
Reading through the lens of gender
The goal of feminism is to “attend to the cultural imprint of patriarchy as we read” What does this really mean?

What assumptions about feminism might we encounter in the classroom? Why resistance? How do we address that in the classroom? Feminism is over. When do we say the F word? Do we start with the theory overview or the text? Does that change in different circumstances?

Exercise for students: Personal experience that is similar to the text. Also, key to linking text and context.

Why teach it?
Recognizing other perspectives
Ask questions about the construction of culture, of texts, and of meaning in the process of constructing interpretations. Why is that important?
Become aware of the ideologies with which texts and the world are inscribed
It does aim at changing the world and the consciousness of people in it. Are you making little feminists?
Consider characters from more than one point of view
Help interpret, understand, and respond to life

How does this approach fit with Reader Response or New Critical approaches that are so common? Reader Response: Focus on how reader’s gender affects interpretation
New Critical:

How does it move past both of those?
Focuses on abstraction by connecting the text to the world; it’s a tool to aid the process of learning to abstract.

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We spent most of the class time looking at the text. I was happy with the close reading of Finch's Landing. Some of the students' interpretations were exciting because I had never considered them. It was a good time to learn from the students. I wish that I had gotten to the pedagogy focus a bit sooner. The class is so engaged with textual analysis that it was actually hard to move out of the primary text. I'm excited that I can continue talking some about this maybe next Wednesday. We have a speaker on Monday. I'm planning to do some research on him to prepare. I think toward to end of class a couple of students on the left side of the room disengaged. I know that students do that in general when the end of class approaches. However, I do feel that if we transitioned into the secondary text sooner, maybe they would've hung on better. I feel comfortable with this group of students. I like them.