Relating to One's Students: identity, morality, stories and questions

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
At the present moment, American undergraduates are highly critical of their colleges and universities. Provoked by representations of the state of higher education in the popular press, students are vigorously engaged in debates regarding the ‘Canon’ and ‘political correctness’. In this essay, I interpret student criticism and our responses to those criticisms in the context of larger questions of morality. I argue that a principal aim of education is the development of a moral imagination, and that the development of a moral imagination is embedded in processes of identity formation and identification. In an educational setting, these processes involve students in locating their own questions in material to be studied and in identifying with and responding to the questions of others. I describe the use of fiction writing to enable students to find their own questions, and thereby find themselves.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: