Learning through a Literary Lens: Narratives of Critique and Hope in the Educational Imagination

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What is it in your educational experience–the vast preoccupation of your life thus far–that accounts for your ability to endeavor, even in the face of risk, toward what is good, beautiful, just, and true? Martin Luther King, Jr., referred to such a quality of life as being thermostatic, insisting that we be not merely thermometers that record “the ideas and principles of popular opinion,” but thermostats that “transform the mores of society.” This course provides students a literary lens to understand such a desired impact of education as a field of study, using five literary works from which we can deduce how, over the course of life’s various stages, different forms of education, including schooling, shape our capacities for critique and hope. Through its analytical readings and intensive writing, the course enables students to: 1) gain a metacognitive perspective on their own thinking and learning, addressing why you succeed in schooling especially; 2) examine the educational imagination by which we, especially through literature, constitute meaningful lives of coherence; and 3) consider factors in the creative process and where knowing is going on the basis of how literature and the processes of writing, in particular, forge new models of reality. Toward these ends, we will read five classics of literature representative of different periods in the 20th century–Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961), Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), and Wendell Berry’s A World Lost (1996)–keeping in mind literature with which students might be contemporaneously familiar about schooling and education alongside writers on narrative theories.