Character education through poetic inquiry: teaching poetry as a means of moral self-cultivation

ABSTRACT

This paper offers retrospective reflections following on from a poetry-based character-education intervention, conducted in an Icelandic secondary-school setting. The object of the intervention was to assess the use of poetry in the classroom to enhance students’ virtue literacy. This paper discusses the theoretical frameworks undergirding this research project. It assesses Linda Christensen’s poetic inquiry as a means of moral self-cultivation. It then compares this approach to the framework of Aristotelian character education. Subsequently, this paper introduces samples of poetic inquiry, namely Gina Edghill’s “The Culture of My Community Revealed. Poetic and Narrative Beginnings” and Jacquie Kidd’s “White Skin, Brown Soul. A Poetic Autoethnograpy”, to show how poetry in the classroom can encourage the development of virtue. More specifically, the paper makes use of the components in a recent Aristotelian phronesis model (APM) to illustrate comparisons of poetic inquiry with Aristotelian character education.

KEYWORDS:

• Character education
• poetry
• poetic inquiry
• practical wisdom
• Icelandic secondary schools
• qualitative study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The full poem, as well as a sound clip of Ellis reading the poem, can be found at the Coal Black Voices website: https://web.archive.org/web/20201114002527/http://www.coalblackvoices.com/poets/kelly/video.html

2 By a Socratic dialogue in this paper the present author means a dialogue that involves a group of participants (students) led by a moderator (teacher) who, without him- or herself adding anything to the discussion, aids the participants in exchanging ideas, making themselves understandable to others, and being open to having to defend their ideas and point of view by offering supporting arguments thereof, and/or having the courage to change their opinion if the group finds a better assessment of the topic at hand. See e.g. Brenifier (2015), Kennedy (2018), and NSW Government (2014).