Amanda Light Dunbar, our guest blogger this week, is a first-year PhD student in Concordia University’s Department of Education. Her primary research focuses on students’ use of SparkNotes study guides for support with high school English Language Arts. Amanda’s work is informed by her interests in inclusive education, Universal Design for Learning, and social justice. Much of her understanding of systemic inequality comes from spending too much time on Twitter. Find her there at @ADunbot or email amanda.light.dunbar@gmail.com.

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In 2021, readers of the New York Times (NYT) Book Review voted To Kill a Mockingbird the best book of the past 125 years. This caught my attention because Mockingbird comes up frequently in my research on high school English Language Arts (ELA). I’m interested in what it means to “read” a school novel in a context where study guides and prefab essays are widely available, and I use Mockingbird as an example of how easy it is to learn about plot, characters, themes and literary devices without ever picking up the novel. Many people love To Kill a Mockingbird—it won Harper Lee the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1961 and just won the title of best book of the past 125 years—but I have also seen it described as “one of the most often not read” by high school ELA students (Broz, 2011, p. 15). Somewhere in this contrast is something to be learned about who English class is for, who is included and welcomed, and who is othered and excluded by teachers’ and school boards’ curricular choices.

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