Rationale
I work at a math and science academy on the South Side of Chicago. Though we are a selective school where students test in, seventy percent of our students qualify for subsidized lunch and many will be the first in their family to attend college. As a result of the school’s thematic focus, entrance exam scores of our students are often higher in the science and math categories, but scores in reading comprehension vary widely. In addition, our students, like many across the nation, struggle with academic resilience—the ability to persevere through the early struggles of academic challenges and to know the joy of learning once a foundation of knowledge about a new topic has been built. This is particularly true when it comes to analysis of complicated texts in various mediums. Too often students will find ways to avoid complexity through fear of failure and due to their interpretation of struggle as weakness.
To address these needs this unit will serve as the baseline for my women’s studies course taught as an elective to 11th and 12th grade students. The purpose of the unit is to introduce the skill of reading various texts (fiction, non-fiction, and film) in order to examine the concepts of “reading gender” and to introduce the necessary intersectional awareness in text and film to prepare students for the kind of analytical thinking we will be developing throughout the year.
The choice of novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and its film adaptation is a purposeful choice based on the accessibility of both in terms of text complexity and film techniques. Many students will have read the novel in 8th grade and that familiarity will help serve the purpose of text analysis without having to do extended review of the plot and characters. The story also provides many places to discuss the three elements of writing/filmmaking that I plan to analyze—setting, character, and events. The film adaptation is close enough to the novel to allow for a rich comparison of meaning gained and lost through each medium.
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