Teaching Parable of the Sower

A novel like this would be best for 11th and 12th graders either in book clubs or individually. Students would maintain a journal in which they took Butler’s parables and related them to what happened in that section of the book. They would also be given background information, mostly news articles, of the growing chasm between the rich and literary criticisms of slave narratives. There is a particular commentator that fleshes out how, why, and to what end slave narratives went to invoke a sense of empathy for their largely White audience.

This would be a great novel to end a unit analyzing the role of slave narratives in America. Students should read Incidents of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs and, although not actually a slave narrative, The Confessions of Nat Turner by Thomas Ruffin Gray. Some supplemental material would be Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, a film by Charles Burnett and biographies of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. Incidents of a Slave girl would work well with Parable of the Sower because Butler, like Jacobs, emphasizes the suffering of girls on the verge of woman hood during slavery and slave-like conditions. The Confessions of Nat Turner by Gray along with Burnett’s film and the biography of Sojourner Truth would allow some interesting analysis to occur pertaining freedom and religious “restructuring” in Parable of the Sower. And finally the biography of Harriet Tubman would offer a lot of dialogue about woman taking up the appearance of men and traveling north while stewarding runaways.