Reading to Kill a Mockingbird in Community: Relationships and Renewal

The steady stream of high schoolers, their parents, siblings, and grandparents continued all evening. For the duration of the two-hour event, people filed into the museum to walk past and admire the six large oil paintings displayed on easels throughout the main floor of the museum lobby. Each of the brightly colored panels, created in collaboration between a professional artist and English classes from high schools in the area, illustrated a scene in To Kill a Mockingbird.Throughout the evening, students excitedly walked to the panel that they had helped to create. "See that chair?" one boy asked his mom, pointing to a panel that had, as its chosen scene, a classroom full of students (see Figure 1). "I did that," he said proudly. He went on to describe the scene and when in the novel it took place. It was obvious his mom was not familiar with the novel, but it was also obvious that she was proud of her son and his work."I love seeing all these young people here on a Friday night," an elderly woman commented to us as we stood by the front door of the museum, passing out brochures. "It really is impressive." Impressive it was. Students and teachers from different schools, so often rivals at sports games and other competitions, shared in a common experience. Community members initiated conversations with "young people" about their interpretations of a piece of literature.Like in most high schools in the United States, To Kill a Mockingbird was already part of the regular English curriculum for the schools in our community. For years, students and teachers in our community have read the novel together, learned about life in the South during the 1930s, discussed its many themes, and completed book-related activities. However, this year was different. Teachers and students from seven area schools along with hundreds of community members participated in a month-long communitywide reading program. These 3,000 intergenerational and cross-cultural participants came together for a common purpose: to read, learn about, and discuss a classic piece of American literature. In the process, they ended up learning more about each other and themselves.In this article, we share our experiences of being involved in this communitywide reading program. Though we experienced it from different vantage points-Deborah as a teacher educator and the program director and Audra as one of the participating English teachers-we were both invigorated by the new relationships that formed because of our involvements with the program. We explore the implications of these involvements on teaching and learning and offer suggestions to other teachers and teacher educators for establishing community partnerships in their own contexts.To do so, we draw on sociocultural perspectives of literacy and the idea that literacy experiences are embedded in particular contexts. James Paul Gee, the New London Group, and David Barton and Mary Hamilton, among others, have suggested that reading is not an isolated set of skills but rather a social practice that is deeply embedded in particular contexts and communities. What readers bring to texts, wherever they might encounter them, is shaped by their background knowledge, identities, and experiences. As Edward H. Behrman writes, "Literate action requires the transposition of thought into symbolic form that can be conveyed to others or to self. Therefore, literacy is particularly affected by our involvement in a community" (26). Reading and discussing literature in a communitywide reading program foregrounds its contextual aspect, taking literature out of a traditional school or academic context and placing it within a particular geographic community of people. Our involvements, and the involvements of our participants, encouraged us to experience literature in new ways and to embrace new identities in our community.Admittedly, most teachers do not have the time, contacts, or funds to organize or be involved with a program of our magnitude. …