With global risks such as terrorism, fundamentalism, and xenophobia permeating our everyday consciousness, there is a pressing need for educators to cultivate in their students a cosmopolitan ...hospitality toward multiple and marginalized others in the world. Yet, despite growing interest in ethics among literary scholars, theorizations of ethical criticism are predominantly observed among scholars working in university settings rather than at high schools, and major scholarly texts on ethical criticism focus on literary texts that provoke ethical responses rather than on pedagogical strategies. In this essay, Suzanne Choo aims to address these two gaps by arguing that cosmopolitan ethical criticism should be a core feature of literature pedagogy in schools and by describing its potential for developing students as global ethical thinkers. The article situates cosmopolitan ethical criticism by distinguishing it from two other disciplinary practices, aesthetic criticism and didactic ethical criticism. It goes on to describe what cosmopolitan ethical criticism may look like in the classroom by examining pedagogical approaches to teaching literature employed by four high school teachers in Australia, Singapore, and the United States.
Recent debates among scholars in Literature education have led to polarizing views about the aims of the subject. The debate reignites ancient quarrels about the aesthetic and political values of ...literary study and relatedly, the different pedagogical approaches to teaching. In the first part of this paper, I explore the aesthetic-political divide in Literature education paying particular attention to how this was reinforced by New Criticism and Poststructuralist Criticism as these were key movements that have had a significant influence on the teaching of Literature in schools. More importantly, I argue that such a divide exemplified the different goals of the West, in which Literature education originated as a platform for the cultivation of taste, and Postcolonial countries, in which the subject was utilized as a political tool for colonization resulting in acts of mimicry and subversion among colonized subjects. In the second part of the paper, I apply third space theory to disrupt the aesthetic-political divide. I discuss the need to create third spaces in Literature classrooms that are critical, inclusive, negotiated and ethical allowing students to engage with aesthetic, political and ethical dimensions of literature.
Given the realities of this increasingly connected, complex, and conflicting age, governments and policymakers around the world are recognizing the importance of global education. The field of ...literacy has not been immune to the pressure to globalize. Today, the notion of literacy must account not merely for social processes but also for global processes. The global turn in literacy studies affirms the cultural and linguistic diversity of students and acknowledges the need to empower them with a plurality of literacies—critical, digital, information, and multilingual literacies, among others—to prepare them for future workplaces. Among the range of new literacies, the most fundamental is cosmopolitan literacy because it entails critical, aesthetic, and empathetic skills and dispositions needed to engage with diverse values in our globalized world. In this commentary, the author discusses the principles informing cosmopolitan literacy and how it can be developed through literature.
All over the world, educators and policy-makers are concerned about how best to prepare students to engage actively in an increasingly interconnected world. In this paper, I begin by arguing that ...twenty-first century education policies have largely been articulated in response to the exigencies of economic globalization. Further, a survey of the worldwide spread of twenty-first century education frameworks reveals that these are predominantly informed by Human Capital Theory. Conceptualized mainly by transnational and governmental organizations, such frameworks essentially steer education towards preparing students to compete successfully in the global economy. Next, utilizing findings from a case study of two schools in Singapore and the USA, I highlight how the concretization of twenty-first century education via school-level frameworks is similarly governed by the aims of Human Capital Theory and I discuss some of the resulting effects. Using these case studies as a platform for theory-building, the final section proposes ways in which twenty-first century education frameworks can be reconceptualized using two alternative theories-Human Capabilities Approach and Cosmopolitan Capacities Approach. I show how their incorporation in twenty-first century education frameworks can offer a more holistic and ethical vision of education conducive to our globally interconnected age.
Today, the intensification of global interconnectivity is a key characteristic of the twenty-first century. This has spurred governments and policymakers to envision how best to equip future-ready ...citizens who can navigate increasingly globalized workplaces resulting in the worldwide popularity of models that articulate twenty-first century competencies. Twenty-first century education models perpetuated by transnational and multinational organizations posit an idealized vision of the future-ready citizen equipped with requisite skills to compete in the global economy. Informed by economic rationality, such models promote a consequentialist approach to education where the primary aim of schools is to develop citizens as human capital who can thrive in globalized workplaces and ultimately contribute to the progress of their nation. In this paper, I focus on the twenty-first century education model currently infused across schools in Singapore. Using this as an example, I examine models of twenty-first century education from the lens of Confucian cosmopolitanism. I explore how the application of Confucian cosmopolitanism can facilitate an ethical re-orientation of twenty-first century education that shifts the focus from instrumental competencies to humanistic virtues needed for a more hospitable future.
In this article, I highlight the emergence of a cosmopolitan turn in Literature education as observed in teachers' beliefs and practices in Singapore schools. Central to the cosmopolitan turn is the ...view that Literature education should not be disengaged from real-world connections to others particularly those who are marginalized and oppressed in the world. In the first part of this article, I describe core principles informing a cosmopolitan approach to teaching Literature that is distinct from previous movements. In the second part, I utilize case studies of Literature teachers from four secondary schools in Singapore to discuss key tensions resulting from teachers' attempts to foster cosmopolitan sensitivities. These tensions point to the propensity for Literature education to prioritize a form of universalism that neglects the dynamic interconnections between national and global identity; to encourage a human capital approach to education where cosmopolitanism is co-opted to strategically benefit elites and to perpetuate passive rather than active cosmopolitan engagement with justice. I suggest that awareness of these tensions can enable educators to develop more holistic and ethically grounded cosmopolitan Literature education where all students can be equipped with critical and empathetic capacities to navigate diverse and conflicting values in our global age.
Since the late 20th century, scholars have called for a need to broaden the aims of teaching English Literature away from its Eurocentric focus. Much effort has also been invested in making the ...subject more relevant through diversifying the texts studied and connecting texts to current social and global issues. It is pertinent now to ask what the significant role of Literature is in a globally interconnected age. In particular, what do teachers believe are key philosophical objectives of teaching literature, and how does this influence the texts they select, the instructional strategies they employ, and the values they seek to cultivate in the classroom? In this article, we report on the first National Survey of Literature Teachers' Beliefs and Practices in Singapore schools. First, we review four key pedagogical movements that have underpinned the teaching of literature in schools around the world: New Criticism, Reader-Response Criticism, Poststructuralist Criticism, and Ethical Criticism. These respectively represent four key constructs (text, reader, culture, and other) used in the design and analysis of our survey instrument. Next, we report on the survey findings, focusing on Singapore as a barometer of current trends given its identity as an Anglophone country negotiating conflicting global and postcolonial identities with an education system that inhabits colonial traditions. We highlight key tensions arising from the impetus to develop national and cosmopolitan identities through Literature, and reflect on the implications for future directions in teaching.
While English literature once occupied a central position in national curricula, enrollment in the subject has undergone a continuing decline in English-speaking countries such as the United States ...and United Kingdom. Its marginal position may also be observed in formerly colonized countries such as Singapore, where the subject was introduced, appropriated, and reconstructed. My aim, in this paper, is to propose a reenvisioning of literature education premised on the principles of ethical cosmopolitanism. In the first part of the paper, I describe ethical cosmopolitanism by distinguishing it from strategic cosmopolitanism, which has more recently emerged in response to the pressures of economic globalization, leading to the economization of education. In the second part of the paper, I show how the principles of strategic cosmopolitanism have directed the national literature curriculum in Singapore through my analysis of the national syllabus and high-stakes examination papers from 1990 to the present. This leads to the third part of the paper, in which I use a case study of four literature teachers in Singapore secondary schools to characterize the ethical cosmopolitan pedagogies they employ to circumvent nation-centric, economic pressures of strategic cosmopolitanism operating at the national level. More importantly, I discuss how such pedagogies have the potential to foster a hospitable imagination, which constitutes the strongest defense one can give to literature education in the context of an increasingly culturally complex, connected, and contested global sphere.
PDF
