Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories is included on the 2027 VCE English and English as an Additional Language (EAL) Text List.
For teachers approaching the collection for the first time, Jackson’s stories provide rich opportunities to explore conformity, isolation, appearance and reality, fear, prejudice and the pressures created by social expectations.
They also present a particular teaching challenge: students need to understand individual stories while gradually developing interpretations that extend across the collection as a whole.
Rather than treating each story as a separate text, a successful unit can help students identify the patterns, tensions and recurring concerns that connect Jackson’s fictional worlds.
This guide explores some of the key ideas, literary features and teaching considerations that may be useful when planning a VCE English or EAL unit on The Lottery and Other Stories.
Teaching The Lottery and Other Stories as a collection
Short-story collections require a slightly different approach from novels or films.
Students may initially find it easier to remember the characters and events of individual stories than to recognise the larger ideas emerging across Jackson’s writing.
For this reason, comprehension is an important starting point — but it should gradually give way to comparison and interpretation.
As students encounter more of the collection, they can be encouraged to ask:
- What kinds of characters and situations recur?
- What pressures shape people’s behaviour?
- What do Jackson’s communities expect from individuals?
- How often are appearances misleading?
- What makes ordinary situations become unsettling?
- How does Jackson expose cruelty, hypocrisy or prejudice?
- What patterns begin to emerge across apparently different stories?
These questions help students move from knowing individual stories towards developing an interpretation of Jackson’s work as a whole.
Key ideas in The Lottery and Other Stories
Jackson explores a wide range of concerns, but several ideas provide particularly useful connections across the collection.
Conformity and social pressure
Many of Jackson’s characters inhabit communities with powerful expectations about how people should behave.
Individuals may follow conventions because they seem normal, because challenging them carries social consequences, or simply because things have always been done that way.
This is especially evident in The Lottery, where tradition and collective participation allow violence to become accepted as ordinary.
Across the collection, students can consider the extent to which people willingly conform and the extent to which they are shaped by forces they barely recognise.
This opens up broader questions about responsibility. If harmful behaviour is normalised by a community, to what extent are individuals responsible for participating in it?
Isolation and disconnection
Jackson frequently presents characters who struggle to establish genuine connections with other people.
Physical proximity does not necessarily produce emotional connection. Characters can exist within marriages, families, neighbourhoods and communities while remaining profoundly isolated.
Students might examine how Jackson presents loneliness, exclusion and failed communication, as well as the ways characters sometimes misunderstand those around them.
The collection also invites consideration of whether isolation is imposed by others, created by social expectations, or sometimes produced by the characters themselves.
Appearance versus reality
Things are rarely as secure or ordinary as they initially appear in Jackson’s fiction.
A familiar domestic setting can become threatening. A respectable community can conceal cruelty. An apparently ordinary interaction can reveal prejudice, hostility or fear.
This tension between surface appearance and hidden reality is central to Jackson’s unsettling effect.
Students can therefore be encouraged to look closely at moments when their initial understanding of a person, setting or situation begins to change.
Jackson often makes readers reconsider what they thought they understood.
Fear and uncertainty
Jackson does not always explain everything.
Uncertainty is one of the great strengths of her writing.
Rather than resolving every mystery or clearly identifying every threat, she frequently leaves readers with unanswered questions. This can make some stories initially frustrating for students, but it also creates valuable opportunities for interpretation.
Students can investigate how Jackson uses ambiguity to create unease and why uncertainty may sometimes be more disturbing than a clear explanation.
The key question becomes not simply “What happened?” but “Why might Jackson choose not to tell us?”
Prejudice and judgement
Jackson’s characters frequently observe, categorise and judge one another.
Assumptions about class, gender, respectability, race, behaviour and belonging can influence the way characters interpret other people.
Students can examine how quickly apparently ordinary social interactions reveal divisions and prejudices.
Jackson often exposes uncomfortable behaviour without providing a simple moral explanation, requiring readers to recognise the assumptions operating beneath everyday interactions.
Power and control
Power in Jackson’s stories is not always exercised by an obvious authority figure.
It can operate through social convention, family relationships, gender expectations, gossip, exclusion, tradition and the fear of being judged.
Students may therefore find it useful to identify not only who has power, but also how that power is created and maintained.
This helps move analysis beyond individual characters towards Jackson’s broader representation of social structures and human behaviour.
Literary techniques students should analyse
Students preparing for analytical writing need to move beyond identifying what happens in a story and consider how Jackson shapes the reader’s response.
Important features to explore include:
- narrative perspective
- characterisation
- setting
- symbolism
- imagery
- dialogue
- irony
- satire
- juxtaposition and contrast
- foreshadowing
- ambiguity
- tone
- repetition
- endings and structural choices.
As with any literary analysis, simply naming a technique is not enough.
Students should continually ask:
What does Jackson’s choice reveal, suggest or encourage the reader to question?
For example, identifying an apparently ordinary setting becomes much more useful when students explain how Jackson uses familiarity to make later moments of hostility, fear or violence more disturbing.
The importance of Jackson’s ordinary settings
One of the distinctive qualities of Jackson’s writing is the way unsettling events emerge from seemingly ordinary environments.
Homes, streets, shops, neighbourhoods and small communities initially appear familiar.
That familiarity matters.
Rather than separating cruelty or fear from everyday life, Jackson often places them within recognisable social environments. The disturbing element is therefore not necessarily an outsider or extraordinary event; it may already exist beneath the surface of ordinary behaviour.
When studying setting, students can consider not simply where a story takes place, but why Jackson chooses such familiar environments for the ideas she explores.
Helping students deal with ambiguity
A common temptation when teaching Jackson is to try to resolve every uncertainty.
It is often more productive to treat ambiguity as something to analyse.
Students can be encouraged to distinguish between:
- what the text establishes;
- what the text suggests; and
- what the text deliberately leaves uncertain.
This can lead to much stronger classroom discussion and analytical writing.
Different interpretations are possible, but they still need to be supported by evidence from Jackson’s writing.
Teaching students to become comfortable with uncertainty can also help them develop more sophisticated interpretations instead of searching for a single predetermined meaning.
A possible teaching sequence for The Lottery and Other Stories
There are many ways to structure the collection, but a unit might progress through the following stages.
1. Introduce Jackson and the collection
Establish relevant contextual information and introduce students to some of the recurring concerns in Jackson’s writing.
2. Consolidate first-reading comprehension
Ensure students have a secure understanding of important events, characters, motivations and endings.
This is particularly important with a short-story collection, where students need to retain knowledge across multiple texts.
3. Introduce significant ideas through individual stories
Use particular stories to establish concepts such as conformity, isolation, appearance and reality, fear and social judgement.
4. Begin making connections across stories
Once students know several stories well, ask them to compare the ways similar ideas appear in different contexts.
5. Analyse Jackson’s literary choices
Develop students’ ability to explain how narrative perspective, setting, symbolism, irony, ambiguity and other techniques create meaning.
6. Develop interpretations of the collection
Move from observations about individual characters and stories towards broader statements about Jackson’s ideas.
Students should increasingly be able to answer questions such as:
What does Jackson suggest about conformity?
rather than:
What happens to this particular character?
7. Develop analytical writing
Students can practise constructing arguments, selecting evidence from across the collection and analysing how Jackson’s choices support their interpretation.
8. Progress towards complete analytical responses
Finally, students can plan and write sustained responses to a range of text-response topics, drawing evidence from multiple stories where appropriate.
Questions students can consider while studying the collection
The following questions can help students develop broader interpretations:
- Why do people conform even when traditions or expectations cause harm?
- How does Jackson expose the difference between appearance and reality?
- What makes individuals feel isolated from the people around them?
- How does Jackson create unease within ordinary settings?
- Why does Jackson leave some events unexplained?
- What role does fear play in shaping behaviour?
- How are prejudice and judgement revealed through everyday interactions?
- How do communities exercise power over individuals?
- To what extent are Jackson’s characters responsible for the harm they cause?
- Why are apparently respectable people and communities often disturbing in Jackson’s fiction?
- What does Jackson suggest about the difficulty of truly understanding other people?
- How does Jackson encourage readers to question behaviours that society treats as normal?
These questions can also provide a useful bridge from class discussion to analytical paragraph and essay writing.
The Lottery and Other Stories VCE English and EAL teaching resources
For teachers looking to reduce preparation time, Lesson Ready has developed a complete 13-lesson VCE English and EAL unit for The Lottery and Other Stories.
The complete unit supports students as they move from understanding the collection and its central concerns towards developing interpretations and writing sustained analytical responses.
Resources include:
- editable lesson slideshows
- editable student worksheets
- detailed sample answers
- activities exploring significant stories and ideas
- analysis of Jackson’s literary choices
- opportunities to make connections across the collection
- analytical writing activities
- essay preparation and practice.
Because the resources are editable, teachers can adapt lessons and activities to suit the needs of their own classes.
Teachers who do not require the complete unit can also purchase individual lessons from The Lottery and Other Stories.
Lesson Ready also offers Additional Resources for the collection, including comprehensive First Reading Questions with sample answers and sample essay topics. These can be used during the initial study of the stories, for consolidation, or later for revision and analytical writing practice.
Lesson Ready also offers Listening Tasks for The Lottery and Other Stories for eligible schools. These audio-based assessment resources include student worksheets, sample answers and marking guidance, and are supplied to schools via purchase order rather than as instant downloads. They can be used to support school-based listening assessment and should be reviewed by schools for suitability within their own VCE English and EAL programs.
Preparing to teach The Lottery and Other Stories in 2027
A collection of short stories gives students the opportunity to encounter a wide range of characters and situations while gradually recognising the ideas that connect them.
The challenge is helping students move beyond treating each story as an isolated narrative.
By combining strong first-reading comprehension with explicit teaching of Jackson’s literary choices, recurring ideas and connections across stories, teachers can help students develop interpretations that address the collection as a coherent body of work.
Jackson’s fiction rewards close reading because seemingly ordinary details often become significant. The more students learn to question appearances, notice patterns and tolerate ambiguity, the better equipped they become to engage with the complexity of the collection.