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

Quinlan, Kathleen M. (2021) Towards an Educational Humanities for Teacher Education: Building the Relational, Emotional, and Ethical Bases of Teaching Practice. Oxford Review of Education, . ISSN 0305-4985. (doi:10.1080/03054985.2021.1886915) (KAR id:87010)

Abstract

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.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1080/03054985.2021.1886915
Uncontrolled keywords: teacher education, humanities, educational ethics, caring, emotion, teacher
Subjects: L Education
Divisions: Divisions > Directorate of Education > Centre for the Study of Higher Education
Depositing User: Kathleen Quinlan
Date Deposited: 08 Mar 2021 13:03 UTC
Last Modified: 26 Oct 2022 23:00 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/87010 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Quinlan, Kathleen M..

Creator's ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3606-4148
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