Towards an Educational Humanities for Teacher Education: Building the Relational, Emotional, and Ethical Bases of Teaching Practice

In medicine, concern about preserving the humanity, empathy, and moral reasoning of prospective doctors during their medical education has spawned the field of medical humanities. Building on the logic of the medical humanities, I propose an educational humanities to support the relational, emotional, and ethical bases of teaching practice. After a brief review of other attempts to bring the humanities into the preparation of educational professionals, I illustrate two main ways that such a field could contribute to teacher education, using poems as examples. Drawing on the way in which the medical humanities expand dominant discourses about medicine, I show how poems can highlight alternative narratives about students’ experiences, particularly through the use of metaphor. Those alternatives may offer better foundations for fruitful and satisfying relationships between teachers and students. Second, I illustrate the use of poems as emotive case examples of ethical dilemmas of practice. I show how discussion of such poems offers a substantive, theoretically grounded approach to the teaching of values, rooted in recognition of the complexity of ethical decision-making in practice.