Findings

Preintervention results. The preintervention interviews were especially helpful as they allowed us to talk to students outside the classroom on a one-to-one basis. We structured the interviews to gain some insight into the students' ideological, historical, social, ethnic/racial, economic, religious, and gendered frames of reference, and into their world views, reading interests and habits, and past English classroom experiences. For our focus on social justice, we wanted to understand how students understood their worlds.

One of our interview questions was “What is your idea of a perfect day?” Most students responded with some version of “getting up late and hanging out with friends.” We also asked students to describe their idea of “a perfect world.” Many answered that they believed a perfect world would be free of racial and class prejudice, war, hunger, poverty, and drugs, and would have warm weather (interviews were conducted in late winter) and peace. To understand how students had been asked to respond to literature, we asked them to describe their experiences in past English classes. Their responses revealed that they had most often been given words and terms to define, been asked to discuss texts in class, and had taken quizzes and tests, completed reports, and worked in groups on projects. A few seniors in AP programs reported having been asked to respond to literature freely or to write about their feelings and thoughts.

Students were also asked to respond to the “peculiar institution” of American slavery after they viewed, studied, and discussed the narrative paintings in Thomas Feelings' The Middle Passage: White Ships, Black Cargo (online pictorial available). In the discussion the students were surprised to learn that Feelings had 20 years to draw the 64 black-and-white pictures representing the history of four centuries of the African slave trade. Following are two examples of students' responses to the drawings:

It is not normal for me to easily feel someone else's pain. I have an idea of what the African's went through based on my own experiences with such feelings, but I will never truly know. If I were torn from my home against my will and severed from my culture, family, way of life, and my over-all self, I would feel a lot of things.... [This student later lists things he would feel, including hopelessness, fear, and anger.]

Where Can We Run?
They've enslaved us And yet they' re still unsatisfied.
Where can we run? Where can we hide?
Our dignity is taken. They've stolen our pride.
Where can we run? Where can we hide?
We're choking on the stench Of those who've died.
There's nowhere to run. There's nowhere to hide.
We could refill the ocean With tears we've cried.
Where can we run? Where can we hide?
Fellow Africans entrapped us. They've stolen and lied.
Where can we run? Where can we hide?
We hear screams through the night As we lay side by side.
Where can we run? Where can we hide?
Is there any thing left? How will we survive?
There's nowhere to run. There's nowhere to hide.

In this case, the supplemental information offered to students -- video, audio, and visual -- was very much aligned with Equiano's text. It enhanced their reading by offering another way of viewing the information presented in that text.

The intervention phase: Exploring links between the novel and the death penalty. During the intervention stage there were several opportunities for students to respond in written, oral, dramatic, and artistic ways to social justice issues raised in Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying. In the novel, set in rural Louisiana in the late 1940s, a poorly educated young black man, Jefferson, is sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit. During his trial, the court-appointed white defense attorney labels Jefferson “a hog.” Jefferson's godmother, Miss Emma, asks the most educated black man in the town, Grant Wiggins, the school teacher and narrator of the novel, to disprove this label and help Jefferson “die as a man.” By the end of the novel, these two men and their community share astonishing lessons of wisdom and fearlessness.

We feel it is important to allow students the opportunity to extend their personal interpretations, voices, and socially constructed frameworks of society and literature. Although issues of social justice abound in A Lesson Before Dying, we elected to focus on the death penalty, through which we felt we could meet our obligation and responsibility to facilitate students' understanding of the novel and their ability to make connections between social justice issues in the 1940s and in 1999. We took this position to enable students to link the injustices of the discriminatory legal system in place in the American South in the 1940s with the injustice that exists in the American courts today.

It was important for us to help students understand the unstated in the text -- information that was needed for them to be able to view American history and politics from an emic perspective. In order to understand events in the story, it is necessary to go beyond a simple reading of the words to, in Freirean terms, a reading of the world. We began the unit by problematizing the word hog by posing questions designed to help students deconstruct the idea of labeling a person this way, especially as it related to issues of race, class, gender, and power in the novel.

Second, we introduced Image Theatre (Boal, 1995; Lloyd, Kuhlman, & Erickson, 1998), in which students were required to “freeze frame” examples of oppression that were part of the subtext of the novel. Students selected the scene they wished to portray from several we had preselected. For instance, one group of students elected to dramatize the novel's opening robbery scene, which involves a European-American store owner, Mr. Grope, and three African-American shoppers, Brother, Bear, and Jefferson. The student playing the store owner stood on a table in an effort to portray the character's sense of superiority over his African-American customers, using exaggerated height to represent the racial, class, and social divide between African Americans and European Americans in segregated Louisiana of the 1940s. The use of Image Theater facilitated students' ability to portray physically the subtle yet enormous race and power divisions that run through A Lesson Before Dying.

Third, we helped students deconstruct portions of the novel that lent themselves to cultural ways of knowing and understanding among many African Americans. Further, we helped African-American students use their cultural ways of knowing and understanding while informing others to look beyond the text for meanings not apparent in a literal reading. Fourth, we read and facilitated discussion of a transcript from the television program The Oprah Winfrey Show (Winfrey, 1997), in which Ernest Gaines and host Oprah Winfrey discuss the novel. Fifth, we listened to an excerpt of the novel from a commercial audiotaped version.

Finally, we read Nella Larsen's short story “Sanctuary” (available online) and Claude McKay's poem “If we must die” (available online). Following the reading of “Sanctuary” we had a lively discussion of themes found in both the short story and the novel. The reading and response to “If we must die” brought us full circle as we returned to the notion of equating a man with a hog.

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Student Responses

Written responses. Six prompts for writing about the death penalty were provided; three of these are outlined below. We read through students' written responses as well as their final essays several times looking for themes, and divided the pieces into three broad categories: those expressing a position against the death penalty, those uncertain of their position, and those in support of the death penalty. Independently, we selected the student responses we felt were most representative of each of the categories. These responses, excerpts from which appear below, were written by graduating students in the AP track. While it was not our intention to select the work of AP students, their selection does suggest that these students' experience with written responses made their writing more appealing. One of the student authors, Fiona (all names are pseudonyms), is a European-American female who planned to study for a year in Germany following graduation; her responses represent those of the students who opposed the death penalty. Clarence, an African-American male who was undecided about the death penalty, was a popular student athlete. Frank, a European-American male, was a quietly and deeply engaged student who supported the death penalty.

Prompt A. Two weeks into reading and discussing A Lesson Before Dying, we surmised that the students knew little about racial relations in the South during the 1940s and the way in which relationships involving white victims and African-American defendants reflected a history of racial, gender, and power customs, traditions, and laws. We therefore shared with the students a documentary entitled The Greatest Trials of All Time: The Scottsboro Boys which portrays the trial of nine African-American males (aged 13 to 21) falsely accused of raping two white women in the state of Alabama in 1931. The trial lasted 6 years and received much media coverage. All the young men were found guilty and, although one woman recanted her story, were scheduled for execution. The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned the lower court's decisions. Few of the students had heard of the trial before viewing the video.

The following writing prompt was given to students specifically to elicit thinking on issues of social justice and the death penalty:

Set in 1948, A Lesson Before Dying is a fictional novel about a man who is an unwitting part of a robbery and is then sentenced to die for murder of a white man. The factual “Scottsboro Boys” trial of the 1930s and 1940s involves numerous young black men being wrongfully sentenced to die for raping two white women. Think about your own world in 1999. Are there currently innocent people who have been sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit? Please explain your thoughts.

Following are excerpts from the three students' responses.

Fiona: I think that it is very possible for someone now to be sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit. An example is the man who was proved innocent in Illinois, and just recently released after spending many years in jail for murder. I m not sure if the fact that he was black was a factor in the trial, but he was convicted of a crime that he was ultimately proved innocent of. It is obvious that he could have been proved not guilty in appeals court then he could have been proved not guilty in his first trial. Some reason existed for this and if it was present in his trial, it has probably been present in the trials of others.

Clarence: Yes, there are people who have been sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit. A prime example is the Native American activist, Leonard Peltier. Peltier was falsely accused of murdering two F.B.I. Agents. The Supreme Court even admitted to this false accusation, but declined to drop his sentence.

Frank: In a sense, the people of Kosovo have been sentenced to die. Atrocities are being committed against these innocent people by the Serbians. Though it is not a court case, you could say that these people are sentenced to die.

In each case, the student was able to describe incidents of injustice. Fiona was clear in her description, while Clarence and Frank did not relate the incident to the text but appeared generally knowledgeable about particular issues related to social justice.

Prompt B. Student responses took on a slightly different tone following the visit of our first guest speaker, Judge DeLaMar. Weeks before we began our novel unit, Judge DeLaMar had been appointed to a statewide committee to review the death penalty in Illinois. We invited him to speak to our class to help students better understand the death penalty and how it is handed down. He added important and insightful information to our growing understanding of the death penalty.

Following his presentation, students were asked to write a response that addressed discrepancies they noticed between the criminal justice system portrayed in the novel and that described by the judge.

Fiona: In the novel, Jefferson was sentenced and given the death penalty in an obviously unfair and racist trial. Now, the justice system has been modified so that defendants are more protected against the type of trial that Jefferson received. But, because the penalty does still exist, there is still room for an irreversible error, such as in Jefferson's case. As Judge DeLamar stated yesterday, of the 17 people given the death penalty, 11 have been set free. This shows that errors have occurred and therefore they could occur again.

Clarence: From a legal standpoint, Jefferson's conviction of murder is justified, according to Judge DeLamar. However, the punishment of execution is not. It is an example of the mistreatment towards Blacks that was abundant during this time period. It seems that in Jefferson's case and the array of cases Judge DeLamar described, that there are many loopholes in our legal system that can have bad results. I do not have the answer to how this problem can be fixed, but it should not be overlooked.

Frank: I think the discrepancies are what caused the states to add more and more guidelines for the death penalty. Instances like Jefferson's trial or other trials similar to Jefferson's but with more publicity make people realize the poor judgment and legal atrocities committed within the courtroom. I think, though, that if we reform too much, and add too many guidelines, that eventually there will be no more death penalty, and I have strong aversions to that notion.

These responses more clearly described students' positions on the death penalty issue. As a class we continued to explore this issue in our readings and through additional materials that provided sociohistorical information.

Prompt C. Students were asked to write an essay concerned with issues of social justice for their final response to the novel. The prompt given was “What lessons have you learned from A Lesson Before Dying?”

Fiona: A lesson I have learned from this book is the importance of believing in yourself and believing that although you may not be a hero, perhaps you may become one through helping others to become heroes. The purpose of life can vary for everyone, as it did for Jefferson and Grant, but that does not mean that some do not have a purpose.... Because most people are not always forced into a task that could make heroes, as Grant was, it is important to believe in yourself, to believe that each person does have a purpose in life, and to know that they are important and will make a difference.

Clarence: If I were on trial, would my attorney refer to me as a hog? I would hope that in the case that I would come off as being somewhat intelligent. In Jefferson's case, his racist lawyer had no hopes of getting Jefferson off. The Judge and the jury had no intent in letting this black man go. To them, Jefferson really wasn't anything, but a hog. If he had at least a little bit of intellect, it might not have gotten him off, but it would have at least given him his dignity. This ordeal taught me that I must conduct myself in a rational mature manner in every situation possible.

Frank: Another issue that I thought a great deal about after completing this novel, and listening to our guest speakers, is my opinion on the death penalty. While I still firmly believe in capital punishment, incidents such as Jefferson's helped me to see the other view of anti-death penalty. Also the video of the Scottsboro Boys, helped me to consider the opposing views I learned, that it is not a good idea to adamantly support one view, and disregard the opposing opinion without first looking at it from the other point of view.

The responses written after reading the novel show that students began to articulate their positions more clearly -- and in the case of Frank, evinced some growth and change.

We triangulated other data for Fiona, Clarence, and Frank, reviewing preintervention interviews, videotaped recordings of the class, additional written responses, postintervention interviews and questionnaires, and participation in all in-class activities as noted in our field notes and reflective journals. Here we found a much richer, yet very consistent, description of the students' thinking on issues of social justice as revealed over time. For example, Fiona was very quiet in class, seldom volunteering her point of view, but she created thoughtful artistic work and was very involved in her group's dramatic presentation of an excerpt from the novel. In toto, her responses suggest that she made determined efforts to address issues of social injustice, from her stance on the kidnapping of Olaudah Equiano to her concern for falsely imprisoned suspects and her views on the death penalty. In response to prompts specifically related to the novel and the death penalty, Fiona used sophisticated legal terminology to articulate her concerns.

Clarence, by contrast, was very outspoken in class, often challenging others' viewpoints, especially those that were contrary to his own. He grew weary of discussions that focused on the African-American experience, and mentioned on several occasions how “things have changed.” His oral responses during discussions often vacillated between support and opposition to the death penalty, depending on his growing knowledge of law. During the postinterview he commented on how additional information on the death penalty had been helpful: “It made you think of all the details that were going along with the whole death penalty thing and Jefferson being on death row and the judicial side of it. And it made me put it into perspective -- like if this could happen, like in Illinois at this time, which is no, well I guess not.” His comments and actions suggest his conflicting views and feelings about issues of race and power in general, which added to his lack of certainty on issues of social justice.

Frank, though compliant and respectful in class, was a silent resistor to change. He stated in his final essay that

through out my high school career, I have read many books about African American oppression dealing with issues such as slavery and the Civil Rights Era, and frankly I didn't much enjoy them. In fact, I was annoyed that I was force fed this information even though it is a very important part of American history. This is the first book, however, about that particular subject that I have actually enjoyed reading, and I have learned a few important things from reading the novel.

Frank often sat quietly with his arms wrapped around himself or placed his head on his desk, especially during guest presentations. He appeared to be distancing himself from the information being offered, though his final essay suggests that he was able to view more than one side of an issue.

Our review of data for other students suggests that Fiona, Clarence, and Frank were representative of the range of responses. For instance, there were students who were as consistently adamant and forthright about the importance of fighting for social justice as Fiona. Likewise, there were students who vacillated in their opinions, like Clarence. And, there were several students who exhibited behaviors of resistance, like Frank. For example, the inappropriate behaviors of several European-American males who were more vocal and demonstrative than Frank in revealing their discomfort and resistance to the novel, discussions, and activities, were similar to those described by Beach (1994, 1996) and Spears-Bunton (1992).

Alternative or nonprint responses. In addition to providing written responses, students were offered the opportunity to respond in oral, dramatic, and artistic ways. Some students excelled in response forms that were more comfortable for them than writing. For example, Martin, an African-American male, created the picture on the right, which he asked the class to try to interpret prior to delivering his own explanation:

The man on the right represents oppressed black society. The expression on his face, the position of where he is viewed, and the light source, all have to do with what this man has been through. The faces around him represent his people. The fingers around him say no matter what he does, society will get the best of him, and that there is no escape. The man on the left is the judge, of course. His expression and location are meant to portray what white people in the South called justice. He represents the cause of suffering in black society.

Other students expressed their responses in the artwork shown below.

Reggie, a second African-American male, had a unique ability to capture the rhythms, nuances, and intonations of a range of African-American English dialects. After listening to an excerpt from the novel on audiocassette, Reggie decided to make his own recording as his form of response (download a 256 K excerpt).

Postintervention interviews and questionnaire. We reviewed the student responses in the postintervention interviews and to the questionnaire to learn more about how they had understood the instructional approach. These data indicate that, generally, students appreciated the additional information we offered throughout the process. For example, one student observed that it “added a background to the book that you didn't have. I guess maybe the author just didn't have time to write, or enough space, or something, so you got additional information from somewhere else.” Another student commented that the unit “makes you think about things a little differently.” A third student stated,

I didn't know the story of the “The Scotsboro Boys” and I think it was very important that I learned it, being an African-American male in the United States. And from Dead Man Walking, it just kind of gave you like a good look into what a person goes through on death row before they are being executed.

Next, we asked the students if they felt having two African-American females teach the course had made a difference. As one might expect, students' comments ranged from positive to negative. Many, however, felt that it was the method, not the teacher, that had made the difference. Here's how one student summed up her experience: “I mean, it didn't make any difference to me. If Mrs. X would have taught it, or whoever would have taught it, it wouldn't have really made a difference to me. It's just the way you teach, not who teaches us; it's the way they teach it.”

Somewhat surprisingly, we found that students believed that the guest speakers and video presentations (The Scottsboro Boys and Dead Man Walking) during the intervention had been the most influential sources of additional sociohistorical and sociocultural information. Judge DeLaMar and Professor Anderson were the overwhelming favorites of the students, for very different reasons. Students focused on Judge DeLaMar's status as a sitting judge, his knowledge of death penalty law, and his experience with death penalty cases. Students noted that, while he had remained neutral, he told them things about the law they had not known and had outlined changes in the death penalty in Illinois. Following are two examples of student comments:

[When the] public speakers came -- it got real at that point. When you spoke to the judge, you kind of realized that this kind of thing does happen and you kind of know what the court systems go through, and the corruption and the good stuff that's in it. All of that kind of got real, and you kind of had to listen to that.

I thought that the judge was pretty good because it was like modern time...he is actually there, deciding.... I kind of was glued to him Yeah, he just went up there and just hit me... He said in the beginning he wasn't going to tell which side he was on.

Professor Anderson spoke about his life experiences as an African-American male growing up in the South shortly after the time of Gaines' story. In addition, he shared information on the case of Emmit Till, a black teenager murdered in 1950s Mississippi for speaking “inappropriately” to a white woman, and how the trial of his killers, who were found innocent, had affected his life. Anderson's emic perspective resonated with the students and offered them a window through which to understand Jefferson's dilemma in the novel. Students commented about Professor Anderson as follows:

He talked about how he was from the South...hearing about politics and stuff like that is O.K., but hearing history first-hand from somebody else is just kind of cool; I mean I learned kind of like what it was like in the South, the ratio of black to white people, their going to death row...what the court systems were like.

[Professor Anderson], who experienced it when he was young, was pretty touching.... This guy was actually telling us his life and that was very different.... After his visit to our class, I could picture a little more clearly, the scenery in the book A Lesson Before Dying, the atmosphere, instead of just reading it, I kind of feel something more about it.

Based on the student responses we have made short audio excerpts from Judge DeLaMar's, Professor Anderson's, and Dr. Fowler's presentations to illustrate what the students found helpful; you can also watch a short video clip of the presentation by Professor Roithmayr. (Note: These media files are quite large and may take considerable time to download.) Although most students did not mention her presentation as impressive, they often cited how disturbed they were by it -- in part, it seems, because of her outspoken stance against the death penalty. She asked students a series of questions, discussed answers, and provided statistics that revealed a clear line of racial profiling and discrimination in death penalty cases. She also displayed a large poster depicting ten men who were on death row in Illinois. The poster made clear the number African American and Latino men awaiting execution -- many of whom had spent years on death row for crimes for which they were later exonerated.

Prof. Anderson	(3 MB audio file)
Judge DeLaMar	(4 MB audio file)
Dr. Fowler	(3 MB audio file)
(11 MB QuickTime video of Dr. Roithmayr's presentation)

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Conclusions

Literature, while the heart of most secondary English programs, should not be the sole, isolated focus of attention in the classroom. A work of literature must be considered within the context in which it was written, the time described in the text, and the time and context in which it is read and discussed. When literature is taught within a critical framework, there can be multiple readings and interpretations of the texts and contexts that can offer “a horizon of possibilities” for students and teachers. This is true for all literature -- and especially for multiethnic literature, where history (or histories) and cultural and linguistic knowledge is not always explained but is helpful for gaining an understanding of the text and the complexities and realities it represents.

We used a wealth of resources (video, guest speakers, insider knowledge of culture and language, and Internet sources) to provide a context for study of A Lesson Before Dying. We also permitted students to use varied forms of reader response as they sought to make connections with the text, to understand their connections, and to move beyond personal expression to greater social consciousness. As Roberts (1998, p. 112) states,

The actual reading of texts is secondary to the emergence of a deepening understanding of the world in part through engaging books and other written texts, but more profoundly, through reading (i.e., interpreting, reflecting upon, interrogating, theorizing, investigating, exploring, probing, questioning, etc.) and writing (acting upon and dialogically transforming) the social world.

A Lesson Before Dying lent itself especially well to addressing the “ideological and institutional framework of oppression” (Bronner, 1994; online document), both in the period and location in which the novel is set and in the present.

Literacy learning and teaching are social processes. Literacy instruction, and most especially literacy instruction that uses works written by authors of color, needs to be reshaped to reflect the multiple voices, ways of knowing, expressions, and understandings students bring to the classroom. Luke (1998, p. 307) writes that “our decisions about how to teach literacy demand that we undertake a social analysis of the dynamic communities that children live in” He cites Gutierrez, Banquedano-Lopez, and Turner's (1997) position that as literacy educators and teacher educators we begin to “negotiate and push the linguistic and sociocultural borders of communities” in which literacy is taught. Consider our student Frank's remarks:

[What] I have learned was the so-called “vicious cycle” that African-American people had to endure all the way up until the Civil Rights Movement. I had always known that their plight was very horrible from detailed accounts in my history classes, but this novel gave a first-person view of what is was actually like. Every time Gaines began to describe the vicious cycle, I would actually get a bad feeling in the gut of my stomach, and I would become simply nauseated because I felt I was part of that vicious cycle, and sometimes I had to put the book down.... Knowing that there was no escape for them and actually almost experiencing it was a totally different thing.

We acknowledge that it is not always possible for students and teachers to have an insider perspective on the cultures depicted in works of multiethnic literature. We brought to our study and to our reading of A Lesson Before Dying cultural information and emic perspectives as African Americans, and we drew upon the understandings of the African-American students in the class as “cultural co-informants.” We believe that insider perspectives are important to the reading of multiethnic texts. While student informants are helpful, they should not be the sole source of an emic perspective. A variety of informants should be sought, as all people hold their own particular biases and can be limited by their experiences, knowledge, and understandings. In our study, we used ourselves, students, guest speakers, and reference and supplementary materials to gain further insights.

In this study, we critically framed reader response to better understand how students were connecting to the text and to help them make connections beyond themselves. Our analysis of the students' written responses revealed that many were aware of issues of social injustice but tended to view these issues historically. Our use of multiple sociohistorical sources helped to inform their reading of the novel as well as their “reading of the world.” We supplied information that made possible a more political reading of the novel, one that drew upon literacy skills beyond the “mechanics” of reading.

Fox-Genovese (1988) argues that “to read well, to read fully, is inescapably to read politically, but to foreground the politics, as if these could somehow be distinguished from the reading itself, is to render the reader suspect” (p. 67). We argue that all literature, but especially multiethnic literature, should be problematized so as to offer students historical, cultural, and political background information to draw upon for their understanding of the text. A political reading seemed appropriate in the case of our study, given the significance of the death penalty and current debates on the issue taking place across the United States. Although students' written responses were placed in three broad categories -- against the death penalty, uncertain, and in support of the death penalty -- triangulation of data revealed much richer descriptions and positions within our interpretive community. We learned that

• The lives and thinking of the students were much more complex than revealed in their responses
• Using different forms of reader response allowed students the opportunity to express the connections they were making in personally meaningful ways (e.g., some students were not strong writers and expressed themselves more fully through art or drama)
• There were consistent themes or viewpoints expressed by most students in their responses to the novel, regardless of the response form used

Our view of literacy as a socially constructed process that takes place within an interpretive community of learners allowed us to embrace multiple ways of knowing, interpreting, and responding to the novel. We reframed and recast these multipe ways within an African-American experience. We believe that by critically framing multiethnic literature, we can realize an enriched space for learning -- a space where, as Luke (1998) suggests, “we can learn to respect and listen to, speak with, and read and write different voices, cultures, and texts and we enable our students to do the same, blending their community knowledges, practices and voices to reframe and redesign texts” (p. 309).

Our students' oral and artistic responses to the novel suggest that written responses limit some readers' ability to connect with and make meaningful responses to text. In addition, we argue that the additional sociohistorical information we provided was helpful for students as they began to articulate their viewpoints on issues of social justice. We found that the most powerful influence on students' developing viewpoints were the guest speakers, who spoke from their lived experiences with issues of social justice. We do note, however, that students' viewpoints did not change significantly over the course of the study. High school students come to school with preconceived notions of social justice. When opportunties for critical reflection on these notions are provided, students may change their views, but it will be a gradual process.

We were very strategic in creating the course, collecting the materials, and framing the responses to challenge students' preconceptions. We gave each student the same assignment, regardless of academic standing. There was nothing hidden in our agenda. Some students reacted positively and others negatively to the amount and type of work we assigned. We did not want students to parrot information back to us; nor did we want them to leave with a list of dates and facts about the novel. Our goal was not for them to reproduce the text, but to produce their text as a critique of society from their understanding of their reading of the novel and the interpretive community created in the classroom. Our critical reader response framework focused on building knowledge, understanding, and appreciation for the connections among literature and social, historical, and cultural events and institutional structures. Moreover, this framework drew on the use of multiple forms of response, offering students greater freedom and flexibility in choosing how they wanted to represent their knowledge and how best to communicate what they knew.

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Literature and Other Works Cited

Africans in America (video series). (1998). Boston, MA: WGBH/Public Broadcasting Corporation.

Dead man walking (motion picture). (1995). (T. Robbins, director; J. Kilik, T. Robbins, & R. Simmons, producers). New York/Los Angeles: Gramercy Pictures.

Equiano, O. (1998). Interesting narrative and other writings (V. Carretta, Ed.). New York: Penguin.

Feelings, T. (1995). The middle passage: White ships, black cargo. New York: Dial.