My goal in this research was to find ideas, teaching aids, or lesson plans to help teach students about
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. I was interested in this because it is an area of focus for one of my classmates
Bri Zabriske. To do so I went to the
MLA bibliography online database. This database is a detailed bibliography of articles, books, book chapters and dissertations. The electronic version dates back to the 1920s and is home to 1.8 million indexed works.
I started like I do most research queries by just typing in the title of the book and see what comes up to start. First off I found that I have a very difficult time spelling the word "Huckleberry" (and consequently just as difficult of a time typing it, the post has involved a lot of backspace already.) But once I got that minor issue taken care of I went from 0 results to hundreds. Trying to narrow down my search a little bit and find a little more easily information on teaching Huck Finn I went to the advanced search. I tried putting "Huckleberry Finn AND teaching aids" but I didn't get any results. So I reduced my search to "Huckleberry Finn AND Teaching." This is where I found a really interesting article on teaching Huck Finn. Howard, Douglas L. "Silencing Huck Finn."
Chronicle of Higher Education 50.48 (2004): C1-4. Print. (reference put together by the site
RefWorks. Such a great tool for those who are in school or put together scholarly works.)
This article isn't exactly the angle or medium that I was looking for from the start, but I think it presents an interesting way to teach
Huckleberry Finn. Douglas shows how by showing that a book was once censored from public schools drives kids to want to read it to see why. I think that this article has validity because it points out that a natural curiosity (even if its morbid) will always supersede and artificial sort.
No comments:
Post a Comment