Teaching Character Education through Literature

Awakening the Moral Imagination in Secondary Classrooms

Karen Bohlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134354795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book shows how secondary and post-secondary teachers can help students become more responsive to the ethical themes and questions that emerge from the narratives they study. It helps teachers to integrate character education into the classroom by focusing on a variety of ways of drawing instructive insights from fictional life narratives. The case studies and questions throughout are designed to awaken students' moral imagination and prompt ethical reflection on four protagonists' motivations, aspirations, and choices.

The book is divided into two parts. The first provides a theoretical approach while the second features case studies to apply this approach to the study of four literary characters:

• Sydney Carton from Tale of Two Cities
• Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby
• Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice
• Janie Crawford from Their Eyes Were Watching God

The questions, ideas and approaches used in these case studies can also be applied to protagonists from other narrative works in the curriculum.

Part I
Narrative and moral agency

Chapter 1
The schooling of desire

Several years ago I led a group of secondary students from Boston on a literary and theater tour of London. Shortly before leaving, one of my tenth graders confided her anticipated fear of overexposure to cultural sites and angst that we might not be able to accommodate her wide range of shopping interests. Sarah¹ was a capable student, but completely disengaged from academics; she slid by, meeting the minimum requirements. She spoke articulately about All My Children and As the World Turns, two of her favorite afternoon soap operas, and faithfully recorded television programs she was unable to watch during the day, sacrificing sleep to watch taped episodes late into the night. Nevertheless, Sarah had fulfilled her requisite preparation for the trip. She attended weekly after-school seminars (not without complaints), raised funds, and finally led a presentation on the Tower of London. She had earned her right to go. Fair is fair.

Half way into our tour, Sarah had an epiphany of sorts on our late night visit to the Tower of London. Just inside the Traitor’s Gate, we gathered to witness the centuries-old Ceremony of the Keys. As the fog and cold enveloped our intimate party, the guards marched into sight to begin their nightly ritual. A startling bugle blast and shout of command broke the silence. After a formal exchange of keys and a cry of “All’s well,” the ceremony drew to a close. The guards disappeared through the arch, and I escorted our still-silent group to the Underground.

Upon returning to school in Boston, Sarah elected to spearhead the school’s first literary magazine and sought my support. She was not a literary scholar herself, but she came to appreciate the poets and authors we had been studying after walking in their footsteps, and she wanted to encourage creative writing among her peers. Her experience in London—from the British Museum to the Tower of London—had brought history to life for Sarah in ways that far exceeded her expectations. Soap operas had now lost their appeal. In her final year of high school, she served as editor-in-chief of the yearbook, dedicated herself to the local community through volunteer work with the elderly, and secured a part-time job to finance an educational trip to Italy.

Sarah’s experience at the Tower of London signaled a pivotal point, a change of focus that she has sustained into her adult life. But her transformation did not take place overnight. Her new interests required time, attention, training, and the relinquishing of former loves and habits. Entrenched in a lifestyle that afforded her neither the time nor the inclination to take her school work more seriously, she had not questioned the value of her aspirations. It is difficult to know all of the factors—internal and external—that prepared Sarah for this change. The Ceremony of the Keys and the earlier presentation she had made on the Tower certainly prompted her to envision and articulate her new goals, but investing herself in more fulfilling activities ultimately sustained her commitment to them. Her resolve also signaled a pivotal point for me as a teacher. It renewed my confidence in the potential of rich educational experiences to re-orient our students’ aspirations.

A similar change occurred in the life of a fourteen-year-old gang member from a large urban middle school. He was reading well below grade-level and his behavior stirred discontent within the school community. To improve their students’ literacy skills, the school inaugurated a program that paired eighth graders with kindergarteners once a week and trained the older students to read and discuss children’s literature with the younger students. After six months of regular visits to the local kindergarten, this young man acquired a whole new set of interests. His mother’s observation offers the most compelling testimony to his transformation. When she came home from work every night, instead of finding her son ensconced on the couch in front of the television, she discovered him reading a story to his little sister.²

As teachers we are familiar with the power of pivotal moments in learning—when one student becomes enamored of Shakespeare or another begins writing original poetry for publication. These turning points excite new desires and sustain interest. Rarer, perhaps, are those opportunities to witness morally pivotal points in the lives of our students, those moments that lead them to pursue a more fruitful direction for their lives as a whole. These are moments when they not only see the value of using their talents more constructively, but also when they commit themselves to a noble purpose.³ This book seeks to explore the nature of such shifts in focus. How are morally pivotal moments brought about? What are the factors that gradually prepare a person for such a change?

NARRATIVE IMAGES RUN AMOK

Like Sarah and the young teenage gang member, many of our students come to school having cut their teeth on a host of negative stimuli. According to the findings of the 1999 Kaiser Family Foundation, the average American child

1. spends more than 38 hours a week using some form of media outside of school;
2. has an increasingly “multimedia bedroom”;
3. watches television without supervision.

But it is not television or the media itself that it is the sole source of negative stimuli in young people’s lives. In fact, solid media literacy education, such as that being carried out in the UK and different parts of the United States, broadens students’ literacy and provides them with the critical perspective they need to evaluate the range of images that bombard them daily.

The challenge we face as educators is mitigating the range of negative narrative images and stimuli that feed the imaginations and aspirations of young people. These images— from widely popularized books that idealize the fast track to fame and fortune, from overly ambitious parents who provoke fist fights with referees at soccer matches or from friends who inebriate or prostitute themselves at school dances, from public figures who cast integrity and honor aside and continue to enjoy a celebrated life—offer compelling stories and models to young people. These narrative images feed their imagination daily and help to shape their understanding about what people choose and why as well as how they conduct themselves in private and public life.

A friend of mine who teaches in a large urban high school describes some of her students as so “plugged in” to their favorite music that they cannot stop hearing the lyrics running through their minds while they are in class. One of her students, in fact, was so consumed by gangsta rap that he eventually pleaded for help from his English teacher saying, “the words keep playin’ in my head and tellin’ me I need to hurt someone. I can’t make ‘em stop.”⁴

We have much to learn from the power of the various stimuli—auditory, visual, and interpersonal—that feed our students’ imaginations. Experts in psychology, those in the marketing industry, for example, know how to grab our attention and motivate us to imitate styles and trends in language, and in fashion. Most importantly, they know how to make us buy. What can they teach us about motivation? Plato’s Socrates in The Republic offers a pioneering analysis of human motivation, one that serves as a foundation for modern psychology and sheds light on the power of effective marketing. For example, Socrates describes three seats of human motivation in the human psyche or soul: reason, spirit, and appetite.⁵ Reason, he explains, desires to understand, question, and figure things out. From reason springs our natural curiosity for learning and discovery. We see the nascent powers of reason at work when toddlers start to ask such questions as: Why does it get dark at night? Why do dogs bark and cats meow? The spirited part of the soul is the seat of our emotions and ambition; it desires love and achievement. Our desires to play and win, to become popular, to amass a fortune, all stem from the spirited part of our soul. The spirited part craves friendship and belonging, both of which are crucial in adolescence. The third seat of motivation, our appetite, seeks satisfaction; it is the origin of our hunger, thirst, and desire for sex. Like a fussy infant, the appetite clamors to be fed. Our students are barraged daily with images—both positive and negative—that aggressively appeal to their appetites and attempt to shape their desires. How can we nurture the appetites, ambitions, and curiosity of young people well? How can we counterbalance a diet that includes too much negative stimuli?

How can we tap into these three seats of motivation with appeals that are equally attractive and engaging, with pleasures, ambitions, and reasons that inspire young people to lead lives of noble purpose. Plato argues that in a healthy soul, reason captains the team, directing and guiding the spirited part and appetites so that they are inclined to choose and embrace those desires that are best for a person. Upbringing and education help children to achieve a mature or harmonious soul, to make intelligent choices rather than choices based on whim or blind ambition. Without orientation and guidance, human desires can run amok, pursuing any stimuli that strike their fancy. When this happens our reason no longer calls the shots, it acquiesces to the demands of our blind ambitions and appetites. Simply put, this is what we call rationalization. When we rationalize something we want, our reason seconds rather than questions our desires. In other words, when we want something badly enough we can justify cheating, over-spending on our parent's credit card, or even maligning someone else's good name. As evidenced by the host of scandals in the corporate and political world, as well as rising domestic violence and infidelity, many adults lead their lives by rationalizing rather than evaluating their ambitions and desires.

As they strive to form their own identity, teenagers take their cues from the various narratives surrounding them about what it means to be mature, happy, successful, and accomplished. They look at the behaviors that are celebrated and rewarded, but they also look beneath the surface. In my experience, and as Sarah’s story gives testimony, most adolescents are searching for something worthwhile in which to invest themselves. In his authoritative research on identity formation, Augusto Blasi defines moral identity as “the psychological need to make one’s actions consistent with one’s ideals” (1993:99).⁶ As they mature, teenagers want to forge an identity of their own making, to become a particular kind of person. At the same time, it is a challenge for them to examine the range of possible ideals for their lives and determine which ones are most worth embracing.

Visual and auditory stimuli excite the senses and awaken our appetites. Literature by contrast engages the mind while entertaining the appetites and moving the spirited part of the soul.⁷ I do not mean to suggest that students are mindless consumers of visual stimuli. In fact, I have seen some of the strongest indignation about gratuitous sex and violence in films come from young people, particularly those who care about the story upon which a particular film is based. David Denby, film critic and author of Great Books, attests to the importance of literature to help a person regain perspective and see what matters most in our image-saturated age. Prior to taking a literature course as an adult he says, “I didn’t know what I knew. I had a lot of opinions but no foundation. I think this is common for people who live in the Media Age. You lose your internal compass. You’re caught up in a miasma of imagery” (1996:F1).

How do we help young people stop and question what they find alluring, attractive, or desirable? How do we help them to evaluate whether or not their apparent ideals will really help them to be happier, wiser, better? How can we harness the desire they have to form their own identity and help them choose worthy ideals upon which to build their lives? Narrative literature can help. It can serve as a navigational tool, a compass to help young people evaluate more carefully the life trajectory of others. Moreover, it can provide a wider range of lasting images, narratives that allow students to linger thoughtfully and raise questions about the ethical dimensions of a character’s choices and commitments. English teachers can help students to contrast various accounts of success and happiness across a wide range of medium from novels to films, to websites, to television programs. This book focuses primarily on the teaching of novels in the English classroom but it presupposes ongoing as well as lively discussion and debate about the various sources of narratives that inform our collective understanding of happiness, morality, and what it means to live well or poorly. This book aspires to help English teachers provide an encounter with novels that appeals more fully to their students’ appetite, spirit, and reason and sustains their interest in the protagonists’ desires and ambitions. By examining the motivations of characters who pursue paths of willful selfdeception or corruption, for example, we can also help students gain as much insight from bad example as from good. In the same way that media literacy helps students to become critical consumers of the media, helping students become more adept at ethical reflection on literature helps them to become more discriminating in the face of all the other narrative images and pseudo-ideals that bombard them daily.

English teachers are well positioned to tap into the latent idealism of adolescents, to harness their moral energy, to activate their own internal compass and evaluate its role in the lives of characters in literature. By facilitating more fruitful encounters with fictional characters such as Atticus Finch, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, and Ivan Illych, for example, students can acquire more nuanced insights into the lives of individuals who are not without their warts, but who achieve harmony of soul and are ultimately attractive as human beings. Narrative literature also provides compelling images of individuals who are slaves to their own poor choices, self-serving goals, and obsessions. On the elementary or primary school level, J.K.Rowling brilliantly achieves this contrast among characters in her renowned Harry Potter series. Harry, Hermione, and Ron are far from perfect, but their aspirations stand in stark contrast to those of the malicious Malfoy and the self-indulgent and spoiled Dursley boy.

THE SCHOOLING OF DESIRE

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism…. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the “spirited element.” The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity—Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man….

And all the time—such is the tragic-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more “drive,” or dynamism, or self sacrifice, or “creativity.” In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove th...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• AMERICAN FOREWORD
• BRITISH FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: NARRATIVE AND MORAL AGENCY
• PART II: CASE STUDIES IN CHARACTER
• APPENDIX A: DEFINITIONS AND DISTINCTIONS
• APPENDIX B: EXTENDING REFLECTION ACROSS NOVELS
• APPENDIX C: CHARACTER TABLES
• APPENDIX D: HOTLIST OF TEACHING RESOURCES
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• FURTHER READING