Place-Based Learning in Three Bildungsromane: To Kill a Mockingbird; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; and Under the Feet of Jesus

Abstract

Abstract This article, which focuses on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960); Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976); and Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), argues that the American bildungsroman is a genre that is uniquely situated to challenge and recast dominant assumptions about education in the United States. Although mainstream forms of education are often presented as neutral and inevitable, or what education scholar Kevin Kumashiro deplores as “commonsensical,” the three young protagonists positioned on the margins of dominant society in Lee’s, Taylor’s, and Viramontes’s texts know otherwise. Drawing on the work of bell hooks and Edward Soja, this article analyzes the educational geographies that the protagonists must move through to show that these geographies are structured through choices that center the white, ruling class and disadvantage poor white children and children of color. While formal schooling in the novels conceptually and materially reinforce a power structure of marginalization and domination—the same power structure that has led to the current climate crisis—the three novels also offer a corrective. It is only when the three protagonists stand outside institutional sites of education and center themselves in the local community that they are able to counter their oppressive schooling with place-based knowledge. The transformative educations across these bildungsromane demonstrate relational, or, in environmental terms, ecological, ways of thinking as the means to combat a status quo that obscures our material connection to each other and to the earth.