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dc.contributor.authorBelas, Oliveren
dc.date.accessioned2018-03-06T14:21:24Z
dc.date.available2018-03-06T14:21:24Z
dc.date.issued2016-11-29
dc.identifier.citationBelas O (2016) 'The perfectionist call of intelligibility : secondary English, creative writing, and moral education', Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 24 (1), pp.37-52.en
dc.identifier.issn1916-0348
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10547/622519
dc.description.abstractThis article puts forward moral-philosophical arguments for re-building and re-thinking secondary-level (high-school equivalent) English studies around creative writing practices. I take it that when educators and policy makers talk about such entities as the “well-rounded learner,” what we have, or should have, in mind is moral agents whose capacities for moral dialogue, judgement, and discourse are increased as a result of their formal educational experiences. In its current form, secondary English is built mainly, though not exclusively, around reading assessment; around, that is, demonstration of students’ “comprehension” of texts. There is little or no sense that the tradition and practice of literary criticism upon which this type of assessment is based is a writerly tradition. By making writing practices central to what it is to do English in the secondary classroom, I argue that we stand a better chance at helping students develop their capacities for self-expression, for articulating their developing webs of belief and for scrutinizing those webs of belief. I thus wish to think about English and Creative Writing Studies in light of Cavell’s moral perfectionism, and to conceive of it as an arts-practical subject and a mode by which one might, in Baldacchino’s sense, undergo a process of “unlearning.” My arguments are tailored to the English educational context. 
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherThe Canadian Philosophy of Education Societyen
dc.relation.urlhttps://journals.sfu.ca/pie/index.php/pie/article/view/934/571en
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/*
dc.subjecteducationen
dc.subjectsecondary educationen
dc.subjectEnglishen
dc.subjectcreative writingen
dc.subjectmoral educationen
dc.subjectX330 Academic studies in Secondary Educationen
dc.titleThe perfectionist call of intelligibility : secondary English, creative writing, and moral educationen
dc.typeArticleen
dc.identifier.journalPhilosophical Inquiry in Educationen
dc.date.updated2018-03-06T14:17:25Z
dc.description.noteopen access
html.description.abstractThis article puts forward moral-philosophical arguments for re-building and re-thinking secondary-level (high-school equivalent) English studies around creative writing practices. I take it that when educators and policy makers talk about such entities as the “well-rounded learner,” what we have, or should have, in mind is moral agents whose capacities for moral dialogue, judgement, and discourse are increased as a result of their formal educational experiences. In its current form, secondary English is built mainly, though not exclusively, around reading assessment; around, that is, demonstration of students’ “comprehension” of texts. There is little or no sense that the tradition and practice of literary criticism upon which this type of assessment is based is a writerly tradition. By making writing practices central to what it is to do English in the secondary classroom, I argue that we stand a better chance at helping students develop their capacities for self-expression, for articulating their developing webs of belief and for scrutinizing those webs of belief. I thus wish to think about English and Creative Writing Studies in light of Cavell’s moral perfectionism, and to conceive of it as an arts-practical subject and a mode by which one might, in Baldacchino’s sense, undergo a process of “unlearning.” My arguments are tailored to the English educational context. 


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