Category: censorship (Page 1 of 2)

Week 14: Defense of Contract

April 30, 2018 / geron / 0 Comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Kill_a_Mockingbird#/media/File:To_Kill_a_Mockingbird.JPG — Wikimedia Commons

We are presenting our project on Wednesday and I am so ready. Karina and I found a really interesting case that we investigated and we have worked really hard to create this site this past semester. As in terms of our contract, I believe that we followed through on almost all of the goals we lined up in our contract back in March.

We have all the main pages that we wanted on our site with a few tweaks here and there. The main thing that we did not do was talk about the case from the late 1960s in Hanover County, Virginia. We decided that it would be easier and more conducive to talk about more recent cases because the reasons why it is banned/challenged have changed so much. From that idea we created the page, “Other Recent Challenges” with the StoryMap labeling the other challenges in recent years.

The Timeline and StoryMap is set up just like we wanted them to be. I think that the Timeline looks great on the first page and it ties the whole site together. We found some great images from Wikimedia Commons and tried to have at least one on each page. Our theme worked out really well and with a lot of tweaking, we created a clean looking, but colorful site. For a ton of little things, like how to adjust the font color on the top menu bar, I went to our Digital Knowledge Center for help. With their expertise, I was about to create the beautiful site we have now.

We used a ton of digital tools. I myself used both JS Timeline, iMovie, GarageBand, Canva, and Youtube to display our media. I also found images on Wikimedia Commons. I wish that we had been able to take images from the Accomack County site or some more materials that were primary resources, but I think it ended up working out well with the images that were created using Canva and the ones I found on Wikimedia Commons.

As for our timeline in which we wanted to get certain work done by, we met all of our time goals. Sometimes we even got them done sooner. We also added some information after we created the contract, like the interview with Dr. Gary Richards, so I had to fit that in. There were a couple pieces of materials that we were not able to get. We thought we were going to get a response from Charles Knitter when we sent him out interview questions, but never did. That was going to be a part of the protest page, but because we did not hear back from him we combined the two pages we initially created “Petition” and “Protest,” into one page. Because we did hear back from Sadye Saunders and she was a part of the protest anyways, we thought that it was fitting that the pages be meshed together. That was the very last thing that we revised on our site. The other thing that I tried for a couple weeks to get was the complaint form, but was unfortunately shut down by someone at the School Board office they could never give it to us because it displays personal information and told that they don’t even know where the document went.

Overall, we did really well meeting our goals that we laid out in this contract. The interview with Charles Knitter and the not being able to get the complaint form was out of our control. I am really proud of this site and excited to get the chance to present it on Wednesday for everyone.

Thank you for such an awesome course Dr. Dierking and Dr. Hajo! It was a wonderful experience.

Week 12: Progress Report

April 14, 2018 / geron / 0 Comments

I think this is the last blog post before the final one where we defend our contract. This week I have to say has been quiet, especially since we turned in the first draft of our project sites this past Monday. Next week we will be talking about ways to revise and I am eager to see what ideas our classmates have. After that we are just editing and then preparing for our presentation! I can’t believe the end of the semester is here already.

We are currently peer-reviewing, which I think is going to be useful. I peer-reviewed Max and Robert’s USAO site about the case they found in the 80s involving Catcher in the Rye. They have a ton of great information and I can tell they worked really hard collecting it and interviewing people. I made so many notes. (I am really sorry guys). I took this as an opportunity to make a lot of suggestions about how to share the content and I hope they were helpful. (Please do not feel obligated to do every single one of them.) Annotating another team’s site reminded me of how you would workshop and essay or any piece of writing. I live in a constant state of workshop with all the creative writing and english classes I am taking (seriously we are workshopping or being workshopped every single day in my poetry seminar this past semester) and this was really different because I got to look at it not just at word and piece level, but how the website functioned. I had to critically think about how the site was set up and how appealing it is to the reader. Is it too cluttered or should there be more information here? Does this page belong here or there? What would make this easier to access? It was a refreshing way to workshop another student’s work. I wish I had the opportunity to do other workshops like it in other classes.

The only thing that is lingering that I wish we could have as part of our site is the interview with Charles Knitter. He was the one who I was able to get in contact with first and seemed really eager to revisit the issue and join our conversation, but he has never gotten back to us with answers to the questions we sent him. I sent him an email letting him know that we were finishing up the project this past Monday, but it is Saturday and I still haven’t heard back. Maybe we will hear back last minute, but I am not holding my breath. We are most likely going to have to beef up that page or see about combining it with the page about the petition.

I am looking forward to revising next week and making this website ready for the world to see and explore.

Week 11: Another Post Interview and Update

April 9, 2018 / geron / 0 Comments

This past week was a busy one with finishing up collecting information for our project and the first draft of the site. Almost all the information up is at this point and we are working on copy editing the site.

I had the chance to talk with Dr. Gary Richards this past week to talk about the book, To Kill a Mockingbird. He was recommend to me by Pete Kelly and is the head of the English, Linguistics and Communication Department here at Mary Washington. He also teaches Southern Literature and Modern American Literature courses. He graciously sat down with me to record an interview and answered a lot of my questions about the book and how language functions in the novel.

The whole interview was really fascinating and Dr. Richards pointed out a lot of things that I hadn’t considered before. He didn’t know too much about the challenges to the book, but he did talk about the reasons why it is probably so frequently challenged. I asked about his experience and he had read it when he was in middle school and then again in high school. He studied Southern literature at Vanderbilt and said that at the graduate level there was some debate about whether or not the book should be even considered because it is looked at as young adult literature. He eventually included analysis of the book in his thesis and agrees that because the book has been so widely read that it is productive to talk about it. Now he teaches it in his many of his classes and talks about how it is structured and how some of the themes are so heavy handed.

We talked about the n-word and if it was necessary for this book, and if it should continue to be taught in middle and high schools or if it was too problematic. He spoke of how the language was probably used by Harper Lee to draw attention to the racism of the time and that she probably did think it was necessary. In his classes he has students try to decide if the word is allowable and some think that because it packs such a punch that it is important to talk about. It shows just how much derogatory language can hurt. Dr. Richards also talked about how he likes to teach problematic texts because he thinks it is important to talk about why they are problematic or why they make people uncomfortable. He does think that teachers need to carefully handle the novel, but if it gets students to read and talk about the book then it is worthwhile to teach.

I set up a page and wrote a write up about the interview with him, kind of summarizing what we talked about. The interview ended up being almost eighteen minutes long and the transcription five pages long. I made a video with the recording of the interview and included it on the page and below, so if anyone wants to listen to the whole thing they can. I am also going to include a PDF link to the transcription for anyone who is interested.

I think this interview added a lot of in depth information about the book and how it impacts society. There is a lot to unpack in it and I am really glad we were able to connect with Dr. Richards and create this interview.

Week 10: Post Interview

April 2, 2018 / geron / 0 Comments

Good news times two!

We got a response from one of the people we reached out to interview, so we now have the full interview up on the petition page of our website!

I am also speaking with an English professor here at UMW, who also happens to be the head of our department, Dr. Richards about To Kill a Mockingbird this coming week. He was the one recommended to me by Pete Kelly, the head of our education department here. (Pete Kelly says “Hi!” to Dr. Dierking!)

Sadye Saunders, the student who started the petition to get the book back on her school’s shelves, got back to us with answers to the interview questions we had for her and they are awesome! I am super excited about it and she gave us a lot more insight, from a student’s perspective, which really showed a lot about what actually happened. I think the struggle we had before the interview with her was hearing about what happened through news sources and they confused some of the details. One of the details we were unsure about, was if the petition was taken away from Sadye or if she was just asked to take it off of school property. According to her answers, the principal did take it away for the day, but gave it back to her at the end of the day, telling her she needed to collect signatures off of school property. He was actually the one who informed her about the protest and suggested that she go there for more signatures.

She also talked to us about how the novel was taught in the classroom. The main way it was taught was reading at home and discussion during class period. One of her biggest points in the interview was that her teacher made it clear that the language used in the novel was historically accurate and “used to portray the ignorance of the past.” I thought this was really interesting because even though there seems to have been a serious discussion about the language and a student was still uncomfortable enough with it to have it brought to the attention of the School Board. I am going to bring this up with my interview with Dr. Richards this week and see what he has to say about it. As a professor of Modern American Literature, I am really interested to see what his perspective is and whether or not the language is necessary.

We also asked us about the protest, since she ended up participating in it and collecting over 300 total signatures there. I was most surprised by how she thought the atmosphere was more “aggressive” than she had hoped. Sadye claims that she was never really angry, rather disappointed, but at the protest there were a lot more angry people than she expected. I am really hoping that Charles Knitter, the man who led the protest will get back to us with answers to our questions soon, because I really want to know what his perspective of the event was.

I think this interview turned out really well. I wish we had been able to get one done with sooner than we did, because we are having the interviews all happen at once. We are going to have at least one more with a To Kill a Mockingbird expert this week, and the hope is to have a second come through with Charles Knitter. Overall, I think these are going to be great pieces to have in our project.

Week 8: Progress Report 3

March 18, 2018 / geron / 0 Comments

This has been a crazy week, getting back into the groove after spring break. I think that Karina and I managed to get a ton done despite it being a wonky week. It was at least a weird one for me.

We sent out interview questions to Charles Knitter and I am hoping he responds with his answers soon. We couldn’t figure out a way to schedule and record a phone interview with him so we asked for him to respond to our questions via email. Also, early this past week we heard from the student who created the petition at her school, trying to get To Kill a Mockingbird back on the shelves. She sounds willing to help, but we are still waiting on another response from her. We are making sure if she is not 18 yet that we get the parental permission from her too. I do think that she is according to her Facebook profile (where I contacted her through), but I just want to make sure.

I also called and bugged the school a ton this week. I was transferred around a lot on Wednesday and was finally put into contact with someone who could at least give me some answers. The woman I talked to, Clara Chandler, the director of Accomack County School’s Human Resources and she said they couldn’t and wouldn’t give us a copy of the learning resource complaint because it has confidential information regarding a student’s parent. We were disappointed at this answer, but not completely shocked. I think I tried my best, but am open to suggestions.

Harper Lee's signature. Reads Nelle Lee. — Harper Lee’s Signature. I found this on Wikimedia Commons and added it to the biography page I created this week.

This past week was creating and putting a lot of content on our project site. I just finished working on the Harper Lee Biography page and the background page to the novel. I am getting ready to work on the complaint page. I have to admit that I got somewhat behind this week because of pressing personal things that came up and other class work. I have decided to schedule out time this coming week to continue the work we have planned over the next couple weeks. This week has been a lesson in figuring out how to work on a big project like this in small chucks throughout the week.

This coming week, the main thing is getting the Timeline pulled together. We changed the homepage so it is only the timeline and people can work their way through it. The timeline might be the most time consuming thing of the site content, but I think it will probably be the most used part of our site. There are already a couple things on it, but I really want to add a lot of interactive elements to it. I found the movie trailer for the adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, which I think would be really interesting for users to watch if they would like. Or things like adding a Google map of the town Harper Lee grew up in, Monroeville, Alabama. So this week will be a lot of experimenting with Timeline, but hopefully by the end of it we’ll have a more robust timeline.

Week 7: Progress Report

March 12, 2018 / geron / 0 Comments

I can’t believe we are already halfway done with the class! And I have a feeling the rest of the semester is going to go by faster than the first half did.

We have emailed questions to Charles Knitter this week and will hopefully get his response soon. As of last night, I have been in contact with the student who created the petition at the school. She is interested in providing us with a statement on what happened and gave me some further contact information beyond Facebook. We are going to be sending her more information today and requesting a formal interview that we can use in our site. I find it really awesome that we were able to reach people through Facebook and excited to see what information comes of these two interviews.

I called the school last week asking about the materials we would like to see about the parent’s learning resource complaint, but they insisted that I send a written request in. We emailed them, but have yet to get a response. I think I am going to call again today or tomorrow and see if I can talk to the Accomack County School Board member in charge of those types of complaints. We are hoping they will be willing to give us information about the complaint, but I am afraid we probably won’t. From all the information we have gathered so far I think that this was really bad press for the school system. I would love to go bug the school board in person, but unfortunately Accomack is almost four hours away, so it would have to be an entire day trip which my schedule doesn’t provide.

We pretty much have the skeleton for our site completed. This week is the week where we really start adding content to the pages. I am researching Harper Lee and creating the page where users can find out about the author and why she wrote the book. I am interested to see what I find. I know I have just skimmed the surface so far.

Besides emailing people and creating the skeleton for our site, we did not manage to do very much because we were on spring break. It was definitely one of our slower weeks. This week will be really busy with research and content creating.

So because we don’t have any new content yet, here is pictures from my Spring Break in New Orleans. I went and checked out the Carousel Bar and Lounge where a bunch of famous authors who’ve had challenges and complaints about their novels and plays hung out. I hope everyone else also has a great break in the next few weeks!

picture of Carousel bar and lounge — Carousel Bar and Lounge, where Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams used to hang out.

picture of art in the French Quarter Streets. — Art in the French Quarter Streets.

picture of bagels — Breakfast at St. Roch Market

Week Six: Interview Protocols

March 5, 2018 / geron / 0 Comments

Screenshot of Facebook Event for Accomack County Protest — Screenshot of Facebook Event Created by Charles Knitter

Karina and I have secured an interview with Charles Knitter, the man who led the protest outside of the courthouse when the challenge against To Kill a Mockingbird happened in late 2016. We found him through an article and then from a Facebook event he had created for the protest last December. We think his perspective will be really interesting because of his role in the protest. As part of their event he explained, “Local historian Dr. Kentoya Downing-Garcia will be our guest of honor and be giving a brief lesson on the importance of these literary works, the message against racism that they convey, and why the uncomfortable feelings they create are so important.” Not only did they peacefully protest, but they also set up a local historian to speak, and a group reading. I think his input will be very interesting and add a lot to our project.

Some of the open-ended questions we are going to ask him are:

Did you grow up in Accomack County and if not how long have you lived there?
How did you first hear about the To Kill A Mockingbird case?
What sparked you interest in the challenge or brought it to your attention? Do you have any children in the school system or work in the schools?
Why did you decide to hold a protest?
- What was the goal of the protest?
- How did you choose who was going to speak at the protest?
- How do you think the protest went?
What can you tell me about the petition? From our understanding, a student, Sayde Saunders created one, but was asked by the principal to stop collecting signatures?
We noticed that you learned about the mess up in policy after the protest and that it was upsetting. Can you explain your understanding of the policy and what the mistake was?
What is your personal experience with To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

We are either going to set up a phone interview or send him the questions via email. I am trying to figure out how to record a phone interview so we could have that record first, but if we are unable to figure it out then we might just email the questions. That is our biggest stopping block right now.

I have also called and emailed the School Board, so we are hoping to hear back from them in the next couple days. If not I will call again.

I found this video attached to the news article we first found out about the protest in. It sheds some light about what happened there and I think with the personal interview we will have a great page about the protest.

Week Five: Reading Reflection

February 23, 2018 / geron / 0 Comments

For the past couple weeks, I have been stuck on the readings talking about the voices that are not heard in literature. There are biases in novels that I love and in so much literature these days. Young adults cannot identify even as they are searching for similar experiences because they are just not there.

The Dearth of Narrative Voices in Young Adult Literature: A Call for More Young Adult Literature Written by and for Indigenous People, lays out how there are not enough books written for indigenous people by indigenous people, which on one hand seems crazy to me but then when I look at the publishing industry I understand why. Publishers want a certain frame for these kinds of stories and won’t publish the authentic ones. The other problem is that if they do tell these stories, it is not by an indigenous person hardly ever. “The danger, according to Bruchac, in not portraying students’ culture accurately is that they may feel that their world and, by extension, their own lives are of no real importance,” (Metzger and Kelleher, 38). The thought of this makes me incredibly sad. I think back to the books I read as a child and I find that I was really drawn to stories where I could see myself. The ones that are my absolute favorite are the ones where I found part of my story accurately, authentically, represented. It is still different for me though because I am white woman who identifies as American. I do not have any other culture that my family identifies with and participates in completely (My father’s side is Polish, but his family did not seem to be oppressed. In fact, the town I grew up in was mainly Polish when it was founded.) Due to this fact, I found lots more reading materials than any group that has been oppressed. Even if someone is struggling with their identity, I want there to be stories for them. And when people are struggling with identity and who they are as a young person, they turn to stories and books. I know I did at least.

I think I can see how this plays out in the novel Karina and I have chosen to explore, To Kill a Mockingbird. One of the main arguments that I have seen when looking at the loads of articles about challenges on To Kill a Mockingbird, is that when young adults read this book and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, they think it is okay to use the n-word. That was the main point of the complaint we found in our case in Accomack County. The parent said her biracial son was uncomfortable with the language and it was upsetting. He cannot see himself in the novel, actually feels like there is not place he can identify with in the pages of the book. A white woman wrote it and though it does push past racism, it still

Picture of Harper Lee from 2007 — Haper Lee in 2007

has that bias. I do not think this novel would have been published if a person of color had written this story. It first, most likely would be a different perspective, and I don’t believe publishers would have been open to putting it out there in the world. It is so crazy how we think about a novel, that so many people have read, would not have been published just because some different had written it. Harper Lee’s novel has made an impact on many lives, mine included, but maybe we should reconsider what we publish to make room for a more diverse audience.

Metzger, Kenneth and Wendy Kelleher. The Dearth of Narrative Voices in Young Adult Literature: A Call for More Young Adult Literature Written by and for Indigenous People. ALAN Review. 2008. pp. 36-42.

Week 4: Update, Progress, and Reflection

February 18, 2018 / geron / 0 Comments

This past week, Karina and I met with a research librarian, Elizabeth Heitsch, at Simpson Library and talked about how to get in touch with people who was a part of the case from late 2016 in Accomack County. She remembers the case when it happened and how it was a big deal, so she already had an idea of what case we were investigating.

We asked her about her experience with censorship and because she works in an academic library she has not had anything challenged. Of course, their are patron complaints, but they never consider taking anything off the shelves. She pointed out that sometimes they have things like soft pornography because it is being used by a professor for academic research, which I found interesting. Usually there are access restrictions on those kinds of items, but the library will still provide and pay for it if being used for an academic purpose. Because it is an academic setting you can get away with a lot more than you could if it were a secondary high school or middle school. She pointed out that most of the time censorship happens because there are children and young adults under the age of eighteen reading the books that come into question.

After our conversation on her experience with censorship we asked how we should contact the school, because I was concerned we were going to be met with some pushback. This case kind of blew up in our area, and I am afraid they will not want to revisit it. Her main

Map of Virginia, Highlighting Accomack County — Accomack County is in red. Taken from Wikimedia Commons

suggestion for us was to send an email to the school librarian because usually they want to help as much as they are allowed. By emailing we could present ourselves as students and get across everything that we want to because usually over the phone it is difficult to convey why we are asking for this information and we tend to forget everything we wanted to talk about. Following our meeting and class on Wednesday, Karina and I composed a message to the contact page we found on the Accomack County Schools page with the template that Max sent us (thank you Max and Robert!). I haven’t received a reply yet, but hopefully I will before the end of Monday. If we don’t hear anything by then we are going to try to find another way to contact the school library.

Newpaper Clipping Discussing the Accomack County's School Policy regarding learning resource complaints. — Clipping from the Chincoteague Beacon on Dec. 22, 2016 discussing the policy on complaints against learning resources. From Newspapers.com

We are looking into trying to contact the parent who complained about the case and we listened to her complaint in the School Board Meeting we found a recording of on the Accomack County School’s webpage. She makes a strong case for why they shouldn’t include To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the high school curriculum. The really interesting part about this case is we are finding that the school did not follow their own policy on how to handle learning resource complaints. It is a little confusing, but they took the books off the shelves and from the classroom when the complaint was made instead of waiting until they made their final decision. As it was, their final decision was to reinstate the two books and by mid-December they were back on the school’s library shelves. I would love it if we could interview the parent or the student, (with the parent’s permission of course), especially since the school decided against removing the books.

This coming week our focus is contacting more people involved in the case and researching the author a bit more. We started this past Wednesday putting our project site together and we are trying to figure out how exactly we want the layout to be. We are also starting to meet on Wednesdays from 12pm-2pm on campus and working on our project together in person. This way, if we get stuck with any digital technology thing we will have that time to get help and to put our site together. With the in person meetings, I think we can accomplish a lot over the next few weeks.

Week Two and First Visit with Librarian

February 2, 2018 / geron / 0 Comments

Simpson Library

The photo is taken from the Centennial Image Collection in UMW’s Digital Archives.

Karina and I met with UMW’s Simpson Library‘s Archivist this past Wednesday to see what tools she thought we might be able to use for our research. Carolyn Parsons is a former professor of mine (she taught my Archives and Society Class last semester), so she and I already know each other. She is the head of Special Collections and works together with the Digital Resource Librarian, Angie White. They help students find information within the collection, work to preserve the materials, and keep the depository organized. Professor Parsons was showing me how they had a leak in the ceiling of one of depository rooms, so they are also in the middle of getting that fixed and drying out materials that became damaged. Luckily for the most part, they only had a couple things severely damaged and for the most part are able to restore the other items.

We made the appointment with the intention of asking specifics regarding the book Maurice, but unfortunately because we do not have a local case with that particular book we had to rethink right before our meeting. From the local research Karina and I have done, we have found the To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have been banned fairly recently in Accomack, Virginia, so we asked Professor Parsons where we may start in order to find primary resources.

She showed us a few other newspaper resources we could use besides the couple we were shown on class this past Monday. The ones she shared with us were a little more our area and Virginia specific so I think that will be a big help. We also had a long discussion about what other types of resources might be used for such a recent case. Her suggestions were that we look at the school administration pages and find the meeting minutes for the school board meeting that discussed the removal of the books from the school and we look at legal cases. Professor Parsons showed us how to filter through those and find specific types of cases on Nexus Lexius. I think after we have narrowed our research more we can ask her questions again. We might even try to talk to a subject specific research librarian here too and record some of that conversation.

After the meeting, Karina and I began to so some more digging and found an audio recording of the meeting where the books were discussed for this nearby case in Accomack County. I also found that the Hanover County Schools banned To Kill a Mockingbird in the late 1960s while Harper Lee was still alive. When the author heard about the removal of her book and their reasoning was the book was “immoral” she remarked, “Recently I have received echos down this way of the Hanover County School Board’s activities, and what I’ve heard makes me wonder if any of it’s members can read.” I found that story in this article first and I want to do some more specific research of this incident and why the county believed the book was “immoral.”

From here, we are looking into the specific of the Accomack County Public School Case and seeing their reasoning for challenging the book. I am hoping we can get into contact with the school and ask for any information regarding the complaint and so on. Looking forward to seeing where our research will bring us.