Local Heroes, Narrative Worlds and the Imagination: The Making of a Moral Curriculum Through Experiential Narratives

Abstract

Concern about the impact of narrative worlds and their heroes offered by the media prompted research on encounters with moral models in experiential, narrative curricula. Researchers tracked the extension of a mandated Language Arts curriculum on “heroes” through the experiential narratives of four local heroes chosen collaboratively by teacher, students and researcher. They also elicited and analyzed responses from students to these narrative presentations in order to explore how students understood the narrative worlds presented to them. Instead of focusing on the personalities of the speakers, the researchers considered the experiential stories, and the moments of narrative encounter they offered, as the sources of immediate moral impact. However, this impact, it is suggested, did not adhere to a particular narrative in an undifferentiated manner. Instead, effects varied according to what a particular student brought to the encounter and how he or she was able to experience it. Material from two students’ responses illustrates how they brought their own personal and socio-cultural contexts to the encounter, activating existing dispositions and reinforcing inclinations to behave in certain ways. There was some evidence that the students reconstructed the meaning of events in their lives, were able to interpret their environment in new ways, and constructed visions of possible futures based on this curricular experience.

Notes

Notes

1 The project “Encounters of Ethos and the Developments of the Moral Imagination” was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

2 Direct correspondence of our perception and things in the world has been discredited. Language and prior personal and cultural experience mediate what we perceive (Gadamer, 2002/1975).

3 For carefully drawn distinctions between Habermas’s use of the concepts pragmatic, ethical and moral, see Conle (2007).

4 In the specific field of moral education, narrative has been formally recognized as a tool for reflection on what Tappan and Brown (1991) call moral experience.

5 Narrative is seen as the preferred medium in the perception, construction and reconstruction of experience both in life (Bruner, 1986; Carr, 1986; Hardy, 1968; Johnson, 1993; MacIntyre, 1984/1981; Ricoeur, 1992/1990) and in curricular activities (Conle, 1999, 2003; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990).

6 Booth (1988, p. 8) defines ethos, following its Greek origins, as “character” or a “collection of habitual characteristics: whatever in a person or in a society could be counted on to persist from situation to situation.”Bernstein (1991, p. 9) defined it as “those habits, customs and modes of response that shape and define a praxis.”

7 Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 2nd ed. (1965) defines ethos as “the characteristic spirit in forming a nation, an age, a literature, an institution, or any similar unit.”

8 Issues of co-authorship and voice need clarification. The first author was the principal investigator of the project and worked in the field, interviewing and taping presenters’ stories and eliciting student reactions to those stories. The overall conceptualization is hers. “Janet,” not a co-author, worked in the field with the students as teacher-assistant and wrote 90% of the field notes on this part of the project. The co-author (Michelle Boone) worked as a graduate assistant, searching the large database for materials relevant to this paper. She did a literature review and wrote an early version of the paper, presenting it at a meeting of the Canadian Society of Studies in Education in 2003.

Voices intermingle. Descriptions of field events are largely in “Janet Lea’s” voice; many sections of the paper are co-written by the co-authors. Because the final re-write and integration of earlier sections was done by the first author, her voice dominates the current version.

9 In another school, a very large one in a large Canadian city, students at the grade 10 level had only their regular class time to accommodate a speaker. In spite of extensive preparation in prior classes, co-ordinated by the teacher and researcher, the involvement of the students and the impact of the curriculum were quite different. Another reason for this difference may also be that the students at Crow School had a key part in choosing the “hero,” while the city kids did not.

10 All names of people and places are pseudonyms.

11 Our descriptions from class events are often directly taken from Janet Lea’s narrative field notes.

12 All student and teacher names are pseudonyms.

13 The results of this effort are described in Conle and de Beyer (in press).

14 The original team consisted of Carola Conle, the first author, and her locally based research associate Janet Lea (pseudonym).

15 For a more extended discussion on these influences, see Conle (2007).

16 All student responses are transcribed without corrections.