Razi University

   This study is an analysis of ‘community’ as curriculum in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird through John Dewey’s educational philosophy. Dewey understood learning as an experience that is grounded in the learner’s environment, social interactions, and reflections about life. Education as part of living is not just a kind of preparation for life. Drawing on the key principles of Dewey’s philosophy, that include consistency of experience, social interactions, democratic communities, and reflective enquiry, this study argues that community of Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird operates on pedagogical grounds. This approach presents a specific socio-cultural analytical tool to analyze the novel’s young protagonist as she learns, fails, reflects, and reforms her moral consciousness. By reading Maycomb as a curricular space, we can locate the educational importance of the main events in the story (trials, children’s interactions, racial and moral issues, as well as school and neighborhood life) as parts of a vaster experiential curriculum that investigates social justice and injustice in the novel. Also, this study wants to show how Lee’s depiction of community and social prejudices points to a Deweyan model of education based on social justice in which the learner is embedded in a community of moral investigation and systemic injustice becomes a part of the educative experience of people. Therefore, this research contributes to studies about To Kill a Mockingbird by highlighting its pedagogical dimensions regarding Dewey’s educational theory, showing how a narrative can justify ‘community as curriculum’ for social justice.