In a 2015 conversation with novelist Marilynne Robinson, President Barack Obama asked if she was worried about people not reading novels anymore. He then went on to say, "When I think about how I understand my role as citizen—setting aside being president—and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of 'citizen,' the most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels" ("President Obama …").
It may seem surprising that a constitutional lawyer and elected leader who exercised political power at the highest levels would credit his understanding of citizenship to works of fiction, but Obama's words invite us to broaden our understanding of what makes a good citizen.
His thoughts also might remind us that civic education in schools should not fall exclusively to history and social studies teachers. Social and ethical awareness, agency, empathy, humility, and a tolerance for complexity—dispositions that are essential to positive participation in democratic societies—can and should be nurtured in the English language arts classroom. Teachers of language arts, as Obama's sentiments suggest, are in a powerful position to cultivate essential civic dispositions and skills.
Developing Character—A Novel Idea
At the educational and professional development nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves, my colleagues and I believe that teaching literary fundamentals like character, setting, perspective, and point of view can stimulate a civic mindset. We use case studies in literature and history to help teachers and students connect their study of the humanities with the choices they face in their own lives. As we created teaching guides for Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Lois Lowry's The Giver, and other popular literary works, we explored how to activate civic dispositions through the study of literature. We also learned from master teachers whose lessons and daily classroom practices build students' capacity for informed and engaged citizenship.
Here, based on our work, are three key tips teachers can use to build students' civic skills and dispositions through the study of literature. These strategies can be applied successfully to many commonly taught texts.
1. Foster social consciousness by exploring setting.
Good citizens are alert to the world around them. Understanding the social landscape that surrounds us is the first step in cultivating a sense of the common good, and teachers can foster this kind of awareness through their approach to setting in literature.
Studying setting goes beyond establishing the time and place of a novel; it also involves identifying and exploring what authors Michael Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm (2010) have called a "moral universe," which includes values and taboos, in and out groups, and the "rules, constraints, possibilities, potential conflicts, and possible consequences" (p. 71) that affect the choices characters make. Dystopian novels like The Giver or George Orwell's 1984 are fertile ground for exploring setting as a moral universe because the norms of the societies they portray are dramatically distorted. But most novels, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter to To Kill a Mockingbird, contain a moral universe and characters who must negotiate their place within it.
In the classic dystopian novel The Giver, the young protagonist, Jonas, gradually learns about the true nature of his society, an orderly world where people live comfortably, free from poverty, disease, and violence. Readers share Jonas's mounting disquiet and horror as he realizes that to achieve such security, his community has given up individuality, passion, and freedom itself, and practices "release"—the state-sanctioned murder of the elderly, the weak, and the deviant. When Jonas is given the role of Receiver of Memory, the only person in the community with full access to emotion, memory, and conscience, he is faced with a choice: to assume his assigned place or disrupt the system.
When studying novels like The Giver through a civic education lens, students should map the moral universe through close attention to textual clues that signal the deeper nature of the setting—like the fact that "mirrors were rare" in Jonas's community, where individuality is discouraged. When teaching realistic fiction, educators can introduce historical sources to enhance students' understanding of the moral universe of the story. Facing History's Teaching Mockingbird resource, for example, includes mini-documentaries about the Jim Crow South and primary sources about eugenics to help students understand the norms and values of places like Maycomb in the 1930s.
The concept of the "universe of obligation" can further extend students' thinking about a novel's setting. Coined by sociologist Helen Fein, the term refers to "the circle of individuals and groups toward whom obligations are owed, to whom rules apply, and whose injuries call for amends" (1979, p. 4); in other words, those people believed to have rights that are worthy of respect and protection. In Jonas's world, only those who strictly conform are included within its circle; people who break the rules just three times are "released."
By surfacing themes of belonging, power, violence, and justice through literature, educators empower students to face these issues within their own communities. As students map the moral universe of a fictional community and consider its circles of obligation, they gain powerful frameworks to analyze the world of a novel and their own world.
In one middle school classroom that adopted this teaching method, students studying To Kill a Mockingbird reflected on how a community determines who belongs and who does not. One student remarked that she thought it "depends on how well-known the person is" and what their actions were. Later in the unit, after reading more of the novel, students had to redraw their circles of obligation to see if the characters' positions shifted, prompting questions about a person's place in a community, whether it can change over time or is set and unshifting. Explorations like these are part of the dialogue between self and society that is essential to ethical and engaged citizenship.
2. Stimulate agency through the study of character.
Good citizens believe that their choices matter and feel a sense of responsibility for themselves and their world. Many of the popular novels we teach to young people are in fact dramas of agency—stories of characters coming to consciousness about their world, defining themselves in relation to the norms of their society, and making choices that shape their identity and their community. Students can develop their own sense of civic agency in dialogue with such stories. As literary critic Wayne C. Booth writes, the plots of great stories "are built out of the characters' efforts to face moral choices. In tracing those efforts, we readers stretch our own capacities for thinking about how life should be lived" (1988, p. 187).
After students gain a sense of the moral universe of a work of fiction, they can begin to evaluate the choices characters make within that sphere and to observe how characters respond when their conscience conflicts with the rules and expectations of their communities. Character maps are one strategy to focus students' attention on this type of inner dialogue between characters and their world and to help students probe how and why characters choose to act. To create character maps, students draw a full-body sketch of a character on a large piece of paper. Then they annotate the sketch using prompts such as:
Head: What is this character thinking about her society?
Eyes: What has this character seen?
Ears: What has she heard?
Mouth: What is she saying?
Heart: What is she feeling?
Hands: What action has this character taken in response to dilemmas she faces or injustices she sees?
Feet: What might this character think and hope about the future?
Character maps invite interdisciplinary connections between history and literature classrooms. Primary sources from history can deepen students' examination of fictional characters; likewise, gaining insight into the relationship between identity, experiences, and decision making in literature can illuminate students' understanding of the choices made by real people at key moments in history.
When we teach To Kill a Mockingbird, we often create character maps for adults in the story, including Atticus Finch, Miss Maudie, a neighbor who quietly supports the children, and Dolphus Raymond, a minor character who pretends to be a drunk so the townspeople will turn a blind eye to his interracial family. In comparing and contrasting these characters, students begin to ask probing questions: What is the role of dissent in social change? Are people obligated to try to address injustices that they see? Such questions take students deeper into the themes of the novel and spur reflection on how we choose to participate in our own democracy.
Fiction offers a safe entry point into questions of identity, agency, and ethics that students also confront in their own lives. After they practice making character maps based on literature, students are more prepared to turn a critical and reflective lens on themselves and their own experiences in society and create their own personal character maps. They can ask themselves the same questions they ask of a character: What have I seen and heard? What do I think and feel about the world around me? How might I speak or act in response?
3. Understand different perspectives through diverse voices and viewpoints.
In an America marked by deep political and cultural divides, isolation, and mistrust, perspective taking is another important civic skill that teachers can nurture through literature. In novelist Barbara Kingsolver's (2003) lyrical description, fiction
lifts you away from your chair and stuffs you gently down inside someone else's point of view … You could taste that person's breakfast, and love her family, and sort through her worries as your own, and know that a death in that household will be the end of the only life that someone will ever have. As important as yours. As important as mine …. Art is the antidote that can call us back from the edge of numbness, restoring the ability to feel for another. (p. 231)
Several recent studies have credited reading literature with promoting empathy and social awareness (Kidd & Castano, 2013; Oatley, 2011). Selecting texts that represent diverse identities, experiences, and points of view is an important first step to building this empathy. Teachers can ask students to imaginatively enter the experience and worldview of a character with strategies like character maps (as described above), or the "Circle of Viewpoints" and "Step Inside" thinking routines developed by the authors of Making Thinking Visible (Ritchhart, Church, Morrison, 2011). These routines offer a structured approach to help students inhabit a new point of view.
It's equally important to consider the limitations of an individual's perspective. Michael Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm (2010) argue that "When a character tells us a story, we have to be alert for what the character can really know … We still need to think about what couldn't or didn't get told from that point of view" (p. 119). Readers of To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, need to be aware of young Scout's naivete and the extent to which she doesn't fully understand many of the events she witnesses, like the attempted lynching of Tom Robinson. Students must step outside of a narrator's perspective, and ask themselves, "What questions do I have for the narrator? What do I see that she may not? What more do I need to know to understand her world?" To complement Scout's perspective in Mockingbird, Facing History's Teaching Mockingbird guide uses oral histories of African American sharecroppers and domestic workers whose stories give us deeper insight into the experiences of Tom and Calpurnia. Students then rewrite a scene from the point of view of one of these characters.
Teachers can use contemporary texts—not just classics—to study literature with a civics lens. The booklist Books of Democracy and Citizenship, created by the School Library Journal and Facing History and Ourselves, offers a variety of possibilities from contemporary literature, both fiction and nonfiction. One possibility is All American Boys, a new novel with themes of race and justice not unlike To Kill a Mockingbird. In it, authors Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely write from the point of view of two teens—one black, one white—who witness an act of police violence. The structure of the novel, which alternates between the distinct voices of the two boys, dramatizes the problem of perspective in literature and in life.
There's a larger civic value in such reading and teaching. When students reflect on perspective, they practice empathy, but they also develop humility. One teacher participating in a recent Facing History online course wrote, "I think stories have the greatest potential to reveal human truths in deep and powerful ways. So acknowledging the limited perspective of the narrator in a work of fiction can bridge the way for us to understand our own limited perspective as human beings."
Bringing Civic Urgency to the Literary Classroom
Educators are sometimes criticized for selecting texts just to deliver a positive "message" to students while ignoring the artistic merits, or lack thereof, of the works they teach (Prose, 1999). The strategies I describe here offer an alternative. By examining character, setting, and point of view in fiction, teachers can bring a sense of civic urgency into the English langauge arts classroom without sacrificing close attention to the literary qualities of the texts they teach. When we use stories to surface complex questions, not to offer simple answers, students can gain personal and civic insight. Language arts teachers might not teach the structure of government or the principles of collective action, but they can do the equally necessary work of educating the heart and conscience for democracy. And perhaps, like President Obama, our students might one day say that they, too, learned how to be a citizen by reading novels.
Author's note: To explore the resources mentioned in this article, please visit facinghistory.org/civics-through-literature.
