Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird Read Online Free Page A

today. By December 3, 2009, for example, the “Question & Answer” section at eNotes.com on Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird contained 2,124 postings, with each posting consisting of one question and one or more answers to that question. Nearly all of the posted questions come from middle school and high school students, and most of the posted answers come from teachers at the middle school, high school, and first-year college level. To Kill a Mockingbird is the most widely discussed work at eNotes.com. The Question & Answer section on Lee’s novel not only attests to the novel’s popularity in school curricula today but also presents an opportunity to explore how teachers tend to explain To Kill a Mockingbird to students.
    Perhaps the main obstacle in analyzing these online forums, aside from a possible perceived triviality of the postings, is the literary critic’s lack of familiarity with a method for making sense of such massive amounts of data. In the case of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird , there are thousands of postings at eNotes.com that contain answers written by hundreds of different teachers, and each answer often measures only one to three paragraphs in length. This essay employs a widely used method in qualitative studies in the social sciences, a method called grounded theory, to explore what teachers say and do not say about Lee’s novel. This study uses a simplified grounded theory approach to review a sample of the postings at eNotes.com; uncover recurring themes in the teachers’ answers to students’ questions; and draw conclusions about how teachers working in middle school, high school, and first-year college classrooms tend to talk to students about Lee’s novel. 1 In the final sections, this essay explores the extent to which recent trends in critical literacy are present (or are not present) in the teachers’ answers to student questions about To Kill a Mockingbird .
    Defining Grounded Theory
    Grounded theory is an approach that views generalizations as necessarily built from the ground up, from a wide range of specific incidents in concrete, real-world data. Researchers using grounded theory begin with an initial, open-ended question. In this study, the initial question is how middle school, high school, and first-year university teachers talk to students about Lee’s novel. To explore the question of what teachers say and do not say about Lee’s novel, the researcher using grounded theory needs to collect and evaluate a large number of statements from teachers to students about the novel and, through both close engagement with each statement and constant comparison among different statements, begin to identify the larger and broader categories of statements (or “concepts” and “emerging themes,” as they are called later in this essay) that slowly begin to manifest. Whether performed manually or with the aid of computer software, grounded theory is both rigorous and creative. Grounded theory is rigorous in that the researcher must read and code the entire sample of data (usually more than once, as recommended by Robert C. Bogdan and Sari K. Biklen) and must constantly reconsider the significance of individual pieces of data as the researcher moves back and forth through the sample; this process of ongoing reconsideration is part of what is called the constant comparative method. Grounded theory is creative in that the researcher needs to ask innovative questions and develop unique approaches to the material with the goal of “creat[ing] new order out of the old” (Strauss and Corbin 27). Grounded theory is also necessarily subjective. In order to avoid forcing the data to fit some preconceived notion, for example, the researcher should consider all data and ideas that are encountered in the study and reject nothing outright. The researcher should also reflect on her or his own biases and remain willing to reconsider the