Six years of teaching, curriculum and assessment.

Throughout all of my teaching experiences, I’ve noticed a trend that I’m sure most teachers are aware of — students are not motivated to learn. This action research plan aims to explore a potential intervention to address this motivational crisis.

The goal is to investigate how explicitly teaching students about mindset theory — the concept that intelligence is malleable and can be developed through effort — impacts their motivation, classroom behaviors, and academic performance.

In this paper, I argue against banning To Kill A Mockingbird from schools, proposing instead that educators use the text to deconstruct how systematic prejudices operate through a lack of shared knowledge.

Beyond old vs. new racism. I argue that the “old vs. new racism” binary is an inadequate framework that fails to capture how systematic injustices function independently of individual intent.

Borrowing from Miranda Fricker’s philosophy, I argue that the novel depicts non-intentional systematic injustice, where a conceptual gap in Maycomb’s collective understanding prevents characters from recognizing their own enforcement of prejudice. However, non-intentional is not the same as unintentional: “unintentional” implies a lack of intention that might diminish agency, whereas non-intentional racism suggests that there is an agent who is responsible.

The conceptual gap. The characters perpetuate racism not necessarily through malice alone, but because they lack the hermeneutical resources — the specific concept of racism — to define and challenge their reality.

In this paper, I challenge Edward Craig’s practical explication of knowledge, arguing that the true purpose of knowledge is not merely to identify “good informants” or conduct inquiry, but to dictate purpose and meaning through human cognitive capacities.

The To Kill A Mockingbird counter-example. To illustrate the failure of Craig’s theory, I use the trial of Tom Robinson as a thought experiment. Under Craig’s theory, both Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell could be seen as good informants telling their version of the truth based on their methods. Craig’s framework cannot account for testimonial injustice, where prejudice causes a credibility deficit despite the speaker possessing knowledge.

Rejection of inquiry as purpose. I also examine Klemens Kappel’s view that the purpose of knowledge is enquiry. I argue that inquiry cannot be the fundamental purpose because inquiry itself presupposes the existence of knowledge; one cannot inquire without starting from existing beliefs or cognitive capacities.