The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (2008) requires that institutions preparing teachers consider not only the knowledge and skills needed to enter the classroom but also the dispositions for professional practice. Thus, teacher educators need to develop pedagogical practices designed to foster dispositions such as those cited by the council: Being fair and believing that all students can learn. The arts disciplines, from visual to literary, offer opportunities to promote dispositions in teacher education. This study examined one multicultural foundations course in which students read historical and biographical fiction chronicling collisions among diverse worldviews. The data reveal that the present preservice teachers characterized their experience with the literary arts as engaging. Once engaged, they recognized the necessity of understanding their students' stories. The literary arts led the preservice teachers to reexamine negative assumptions about their students—a r...

Fostering Dispositions through the Literary Arts

/pdf/a-voice-of-disturbance-robert-coover-und-mythos-r1wfownfoe.pdf

A Voice of Disturbance - Robert Coover und Mythos

/pdf/a-voice-of-disturbance-robert-coover-und-mythos-qk3jhnro57.pdf

A Voice of Disturbance - Robert Coover und Mythos Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades im Fachbereich Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften

In Fall 1977 Novel published two condensed panel discussions-"In Defense of Authors" and "In Defense of Readers"-from its tenth anniversary conference on current trends in novel theory. Held at Brown on April 14-16, 1977, widely attended by students, academics, and townspeople, the conference was designed to bring together a distinguished group of critics and writers who might profitably consider the present state of fiction studies. To this group the editors of the journal addressed a working hypothesis: that fiction studies in England and America might be characterized, on the one hand, by the defense along many fronts of the human dimensions of the genre, and on the other, by more abstruse or more technical concerns, largely European in origin. Renewed interest in the author's presence or in reader reactions would be illustrative of the first tendency; hermeneutics, structuralism, and formalism of the second. Obviously the categories were too neat to account for the overlappings and convolutions of the tendencies themselves, or of anyone's critical thinking about them; and yet the tendencies were and are observable and worth discussion. The panel called "Character as a Lost Cause" was so entitled because, among recent defenses of the human dimensions of fiction-intrusive authors, unruly or wrongheaded readers-fictional characterization had until very recently received comparatively little critical attention; and because many contemporary novelists had in some sense written it off. The panelists themselves-Martin Price of Yale University, Julian Moynahan of Rutgers, Arnold Weinstein of Brown-and their moderator (and now editor) had all been engaged at one time or another in writing it back in again and were willing now to speak in its defense-even to deny its lostness. What follows is an edited version of their initial remarks and a condensed version of the discussion which they generated.

Martin Price

Papers

Character as a Lost Cause

Moral and Creative Insights@@@Forms of Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel