Using critical lenses to teach to “kill a mockingbird” : an interpretive synthesis

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore the studies conducted on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and to use critical pedagogy and radical literary theories as lenses for providing guidelines to design issue/conflict-based literature instruction on the novel. The study used meta-ethnography, an approach to interpretive synthesis, to synthesize qualitative studies and sources for identifying second-order interpretations in relation to literary elements and techniques. To enable interpretation across studies and sources, the researcher used the concepts of critical pedagogy and radical literary theories so as to generate deeper level third-order interpretations for providing guidelines to design issue/conflict-based literature instruction.