Character education, poetry, and wonderment: retrospective reflections on implementing a poetry programme in a secondary-school setting in Iceland

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Character education
• poetry
• wonderment
• Icelandic secondary schools
• qualitative study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 For present purposes, by ‘secondary school’ we are referring to grades 8–10 (students aged 13–16) in the Icelandic compulsory school (‘grunnskóli’).

2 Some empathy theorists understand this identification to be merely cognitive, i.e., understanding what the other person feels; others, however, assume that empathy involves feeling the same feelings as the other person. However, this difference is not relevant for present purposes.

3 We understand character or virtue education as a sub-set of more general moral education, concerned with the cultivation of stable traits of character called “character strengths” or “virtues”. However, we warn against too strict a distinction between these two categories (see further in Section 2.1).

4 The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, where the current research was conducted, is a large research centre in Birmingham, UK, devoted to developing a neo-Aristotelian form of character education: namely, Aristotelian character education informed by modern psychological and educational theorising. Replacing Kohlberg’s deontological understanding of morality and moral development is, therefore, a virtue ethical understanding with a focus on the development of uncodifiable practical wisdom to make moral decisions, rather than a codifiable rationalist decision-procedure as in Kohlberg’s Kantian-inspired theory (Jubilee Centre, 2022).

5 By “subject expert”, we are referring here to an expert on one of the following: teaching Icelandic literature; teaching poetry; moral/character education; life-skills education.

6 Details of the difficulties encountered by the first author can be explored in his PhD thesis (Guttesen, 2022). However, for present purposes, they are mostly irrelevant to the interview findings reported upon here, as those carry independent value, irrespective of the actual background motivation.

7 The methodology of the Laxdaela Saga project was, in turn, based on the UK-based Knightly Virtues programme, which was “inspired by the idea that stories of literary significance might be used in primary schools for teaching and learning about qualities of virtuous character” (Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, 2015).

8 An important aspect of character education is the vocation to be a role model, whereby the teacher is assumed to have a positive emotional effect on students. However, what emerged from the interviews was a more aesthetically inspired and “enchanted” view of role modelling than is typically seen in the academic literature on moral role models (where emulation of role models is typically not seen to be aesthetically driven).

9 Icelandic poet (1908–1958), famous for writing poems of existential depth and lyrical beauty.

10 As meagre as the current literature on poetry and character education is, the literature on visual arts and character education is—for unknown reasons—even smaller. The lacunae in this area (Waage, 2017) contrasts sharply with the abundant literature on the use of novels and films for character and moral development.