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Christian Z. Goering and Cindy M. Williams

One of the most frequently taught pieces of book-length fiction in American secondary schools is Harper Lee's masterwork,
To Kill a Mockingbird
. And as many different approaches to teaching as there are out there, the varying pedagogical approaches to this novel are likely just as different as the people teaching it and the places where it is taught. We both taught the novel in our respective high school English classrooms, and it was received positively by our students, something not always the case when working with adolescents and books. Certainly one constant in the ever-changing adolescent landscape is music, and as secondary teachers, we tried to incorporate music whenever it was both educational and appropriate. One successful method we found to both incorporate music and simultaneously challenge our students was entitled The Soundtrack of the Novel (an example is provided in the box titled Student Handout after the conclusion). In this essay, we provide a foundational background for using music to teach canonical texts like
To Kill a Mockingbird
, offer and explain a widely adaptable pedagogical strategy, and then walk through the strategy ourselves, providing our musical interpretations of the novel while simultaneously giving practitioners a starting point in their own pursuit of strategies that both challenge and interest the twenty-first-century learner.

The soundtrack approach is a simple method of teaching a piece of fiction or nonfiction. It asks readers to make connections from a literary text to songs, describe and explain the connections made, and then collect the songs in the form of a letter entitled “Dear Listener.” Good readers naturally connect with the characters, plot, themes, and settings of any given text. Sometimes those connections are to other works of fiction and nonfiction, various elements of popular culture, or past experiences from life. Sometimes those connections can cross into the realm of music. While simple to implement in any given literature classroom, this approach to teaching requires students to think creatively to make connections and then defend and explain the thinking behind such perceived parallels. Whether with music or without, this act of cerebral processing should be part and parcel of what students do in school. Everyone wins when students are engaged and challenged by a school assignment, and that is exactly what The Soundtrack of the Novel (TSOTN) approach sets out to accomplish.

In a classroom setting, each TSOTN assignment accompanies a piece of fiction or nonfiction that students are reading or preparing to read. In this discussion, we focus our attention around one novel being taught to a whole class, but teachers using independent and small-group approaches to literature can also employ this strategy. In our classrooms, we give students the first part of a TSOTN assignment as they prepare to read a novel for class. Then, after students read each chapter or section of the book, they perform this first step, which is to make and record a text-to-song connection. Either during the reading event or immediately following, students take their song connections, return to the text, and explicitly detail why they made each connection. Next, we ask students to collect the connections and explanations into a letter introducing and explaining the soundtrack as a whole as well as the individual tracks. Finally, the students create a visual interpretation—compact disc jewel case art, record album cover, concert poster, or web page—that represents their new soundtrack and eventually present this visual to the class. While our students in the past have found this assignment to be creative and fun, they have also often remarked about how difficult it is to make defendable connections, especially at some points in books.

Though it is not entirely clear where or when a soundtrack approach to teaching originated, the first publication of this approach came in the National Writing Project's
The Quarterly
in 2004 with “Music and the Personal Narrative: A Dual Track to Meaningful Writing.” The Soundtrack of Your Life is a personal narrative writing assignment in which the students match memorable events, people, settings, or periods of their lives with the music of their choice. In much the same way, TSOTN hinges on students' abilities to make and explain connections to the classroom literature they are reading. These purposeful connections, referred to in a 2009 study as Musical Intertextuality (Goering; Goering, et al.), cause students to engage in a purposeful act of intertextuality, an educational theory tied directly to the seminal work of Louise Rosenblatt.

In her 1938 effort entitled
Literature as Exploration
, Rosenblatt contends the reader naturally “brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and particular physical condition . . . in a never-to-be-duplicated combination” (30–31). This reliance on prior knowledge and experience suggests readers bring with them not only past texts but also past forays into popular culture—movies, music, advertisements—as they approach each new text. In a 2001 study, Susan Lenski found that many competent readers make constant intertextual connections. She notes, “As readers experience a text, either by individual reading or through shared reading, they develop a provisional interpretation of that text” (314). In fact, these prior texts allow readers to construct meaning from the new, exacting a give and take “between the reader's evolving inner text, the new text, and the context of reading” (315). While some of our students possessed the literary background and ability to make vast intertextual connections between what they were assigned to read and what they had previously read, we must report most of them did not. Rather than lowering the curricular standards of time-honored texts like
To Kill a Mockingbird
, we preferred to find ways into such texts for our students. By practicing a skill competent readers do naturally and frequently with a less intimidating medium—music and lyrics—students not only gained the opportunity to catalogue a new piece of literature in their personal library but also experimented with a practice inherent to skilled readers.

TSOTN does rely, in part, on Rosenblatt's Reader Response Theory (1938), but the assignment goes beyond that initial connection, which can admittedly be superficial in nature. While that initial connection signals the beginning of an understanding, what student readers do with that initial connection may be far more important than the act of making it. By prompting students to explain their choices, TSOTN naturally requires higher levels of critical thinking and engagement, something very measureable in the writing they produce. This argumentative thinking model provides the basis for essay writing and a myriad of life skills requisite beyond the walls of school. At the core of any reading event are the reader and the text. The second aspect of TSOTN requires the reader to focus on two texts—song lyrics and the piece of literature—and to perform a close, analytical reading of each, ultimately deducing conclusions about their commonalities. New Criticism and Reader Response Theory can, in fact, work together toward common goals, something critics of Reader Response Theory claim is inconceivable (Carinicelli; Hirsch). That being said, we agree with Harris and McKenzie in their thinking that “readers have a crucial role to play in choosing and constructing meaning, drawing on their experiences with vast and evolving networks of texts” (35).

Some of these tensions take different sides in the national conversations of literary knowledge and literacy skills. Should high school students be learning how to read or reading in order to learn? The 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation put sinister pressures on the first of the two, a pressure that may cause some teachers to rethink using canonical texts like
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Since NCLB requires all students score at a relatively low level, that of “proficient,” teachers are forced to focus on students that score in the bottom quartile on state reading assessments. This focus often neglects the teaching of literature in favor of stressing literacy skills, which are applied to lower level texts to meet the needs of the lower level learners. We wonder if both can be incorporated effectively and believe the TSOTN is but one of many approaches that meets both goals of literary reading and literacy skill improvement. In thinking about this assignment from a broader, educational context, it clearly serves different purposes of an English curriculum, addresses the needs of today's adolescents, and maintains significant texts in the classroom.

Soundtracks to
To Kill a Mockingbird

As a method of experimenting with this approach ourselves, we created our own soundtracks of
To Kill a Mockingbird
. The boxes that follow reflect the connections we each made from the novel to our individual libraries of music. Each connection surely reflects our unique tastes in music and interpretations of the novel. In much the same way, soundtracks from current films often share both common themes and seemingly erratic choices in music. A cursory glance through our soundtrack lists will reveal music that works along with the novel but is often entirely different from each other's lists. Additionally, we each described a few connections we made to help illustrate the approach and the varying depths of connectivity.

Explanations from Cindy

“I'm Still a Guy” by Brad Paisley has a similar message to that of chapter 13. The song talks about the many things that make the singer a “guy,” and he insists that regardless of what current social standards entail, he is who he is, and he will not succumb to society's expectations of who he should be or how he should live. This is relevant to both the chapter and the novel in relation to Scout particularly. Her Aunt Alexandra insists that she become a part of the social class in an expected social manner appropriate to the Finch name. Clearly Scout is a tomboy, and although her character changes throughout the novel (she does begin to show more feminine tendencies), she does not succumb to social expectations and behaviors at the sacrifice of self. Rather, Scout and Jem both grow and change according to their understanding of their experiences and of their father's moral teaching and examples. The children are who they are, similar to the song, and their change and growth is not brought about by social expectations.

In 1949, Rodgers and Hammerstein presented a controversial piece called “You've Got to be Carefully Taught” as part of their musical
South Pacific
. The song explains that in order for one to truly hate another because of race, he or she must be taught repeatedly, carefully, and early on. This song supports that hating and fearing what is different and what we do not understand are not innate behaviors; rather, these behaviors are learned at a very young age to the detriment of the learner. This particular song embodies the entire novel as well as offers a weak justification for Mayella's actions in chapter 18. Interestingly, her willingness to sacrifice her hatred for blacks to alleviate a moment of loneliness supports the fact that her hatred is not innate but learned. Nonetheless, when Mayella's father finds her in this situation, her fear of her father promotes another conflict between her learned hatred of blacks and her ability to tell the truth—something else she has not been taught. While Mayella's actions seem to be an exaggerated representation of Maycomb's prejudices, it is both Maycomb's and Mayella's willingness to embrace and practice their learned hatred of blacks that ultimately destroys an innocent man; thus, as the Rodgers and Hammerstein song iterates, teaching others to hate is a learned behavior that must be acted upon in order to keep it going.

“Theme from Romeo and Juliet” by Henry Mancini reminds the listener of an old, familiar Shakespearean tragedy that recognizes the tragic consequences of ingrained and imposed hatred and prejudice of a people against another people without explanation or cause. This attitude is reflected in chapter 20 both in Mr. Dolphus Raymond's need to justify his “unacceptable” preference for blacks by pretending to be an alcoholic, therefore giving the community members a way of writing off his peculiar behavior, and in Maycomb's view of all blacks as criminals, similar to Romeo and Juliet's families hating one another because of their names. In each case, an unjustifiable prejudice eventually contributes to the deaths of innocent people.

The song “Don't Stop Believing” by Journey connects to chapter 22 first through its title. It seemingly captures the essence of Miss Maudie's discreet encouragement to Jem when he is devastated over the outcome of Tom Robinson's guilty verdict. Jem has become disillusioned with his own idealistic view of justice and has gained a newfound understanding of the existence of hatred and prejudice in Maycomb. Miss Maudie reminds Jem of those who tried to do right, who were not cruel and heartless, and who tried to help Tom Robinson.

Through a similar theme, the Journey song opens with a reference to a lonely girl living in a small town and points out that people, strangers in their own cities, live for emotion and appear to be caught up in a world that seems like an ongoing movie out of control—victims of circumstance. While the essence of the chapter and the song both acknowledge the ugly side of the human condition, both also advocate looking past current circumstances to maintain hope and belief in that which is still good and has the potential to get better.

Chapter 29 reveals Scout's first clear view of Boo Radley—not just as the one who saved her and Jem, but as a human being. The song “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash also reveals a similar story. The symbolism of the rain, dark clouds, and obstacles that prevent one from seeing clearly are gone; similarly, when Scout tells her story, she looks over at Boo and really sees him. Her judgment is no longer clouded by mysterious shadows or games nor is her judgment any longer impaired by fear of what she did not know—a theme common to the novel. The “rain and clouds” of hate and prejudice (born from fear) are lifted by the heroic actions of one of the innocent mockingbirds in the novel. Consequently, as Scout begins to see Boo differently and more clearly, her character's growth continues to be substantiated throughout the novel.