Kristian Guttesen

This paper explores the possibilities of using character education through poetry to cultivate virtue in a secondary-school context. It focuses on the philosophical assumptions behind the intervention development and some implications of the intervention. We explore character education and poetry teaching as a tool for moral reasoning through the means of the method of ‘poetic inquiry,’ drawing also on insights from Wittgenstein. Character education and ‘poetic inquiry’ share similar goals, but are not harmonious as far as theory and methodology goes. It clearly matters what exactly is to be cultivated, and in this paper we show that ‘poetic inquiry’ and character education, if used to foster practical reasoning, can be used as a means of ethical-cum-emotional self-cultivation. What makes both these case-specific approaches effective, and to some extent unique, is the possible employment of creative writing, and the development of the intellectual virtue of creative critical thinking.

This paper investigates the concept of emotion and its relevance to education via character education through the medium of poetry. The objective is to demonstrate the potential implementation of character education through poetry, and to show the intrinsic link between poetry and virtue, knowledge and reasoning. It is argued that poetry serves as a bridge between emotion and character education. The philosophy of emotions is explored through the works of Aristotle, Karin Bohlin and David Carr. Character education is understood in terms of a Neo-Aristotelian approach, drawing on Kristján Kristjánsson, Bohlin and Carr. My position is that, through exercising the craft of poetry, children and young students are provided with tools for exploring emotions, and for discerning and deliberating about virtues and moral contextual nuances in the broader context of human experience.

Neo-Aristotelian forms of character education often draw on literary sources as materials, although rarely poetry. This article offers retrospective reflections on a poetry-based character-education intervention, conducted in an Icelandic secondary-school setting. Having run into practical difficulties during the implementation phase, the challenges of implementation were reflected upon through consultation with ten subject experts who shared their views about the enablers and barriers encountered when running such an intervention. The interviews yielded a rich data set, which often took interviewees beyond the boundaries of a poetry-based curricular context to focus on more general conditions for effective, character-inspiring school-work. Through thematic analysis, four themes were identified: freedom, time, creativity, and wonderment. Of these four, creativity had been identified in advance as an interview theme, meaning that the researchers expected to find it. The remaining three provide an insight into how, according to the interviewees, the ideal Icelandic school system should be designed. The theme of freedom addresses both negative and positive aspects of the current state of affairs, while the theme of time mostly reflects negative aspects of the Icelandic curriculum. The theme of wonderment has solely positive connotations in the minds of interviewees, and is the core of this analysis because it seems to hold the key to the question: what factors would enable an effective intervention of the sort under scrutiny here? This theme is analysed in detail, and some specific and general educational implications are elicited.