Christine Jarvis

Fiction, Empathy and Lifelong Learning

The article aims to demonstrate that the impact of fiction on adult learning could be illuminated by a deeper engagement with research into empathy. It recognises that the lifelong learning literature acknowledges the importance of empathy in adult learning and that discussions of the role of fiction in adult learning often refer to fiction’s capacity to promote empathy. There is limited adult education literature exploring how fiction generates empathic feelings or how such feelings might lead to sustained changes in perceptions or actions. This article analyses an example of Hoffman’s work on empathy to illustrate the benefits of engagement with empathy research. This analysis leads to a consideration of fiction’s capacity to promote an involuntary empathy that can help adult learners develop deeper understandings of difference and of excluded groups. It also shows that an understanding of the factors that inhibit the development of empathy and enable individuals to justify the sufferings of others could be of value to educators. Finally it suggests that Hoffman’s examination of conditions that lead to empathic anger is helpful for educators wanting to use the potential of fiction to encourage and promote action in the cause of social justice.

Love changes everything: The transformative potential of popular romantic fiction

AbstractThis paper discusses the contribution cultural studies can make to a transformative, feminist adult education curriculum. It reports the findings of a case-study in which the study of popular romances was incorporated into an Access to Higher Education curriculum. Women participants identified the pervasive and potentially constraining influence of romantic discourses in the cultural products they regularly encountered and noted how aspects of their own lives were constructed in terms of these discourses. They developed strategies for imagining alternatives to the privileging of monogamous heterosexuality characteristic of popular romance, considered the structural factors contributing to the interplay of power within romantic relationships and reported changes in their personal and social lives resulting from their changed perspectives.

The Transformative Potential of Popular Television: The Case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This article reports findings from an empirical study examining viewers’ responses to a popular and critically acclaimed television program, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Viewers’ frames of reference were challenged when they identified strongly with characters facing complex moral dilemmas, who behaved in ways that contravened viewers’ espoused values. This sometimes led viewers to develop more inclusive, less judgmental moral frameworks. Viewers also used the program to help them imagine how to cope in difficult circumstances and found that the metaphorical and fantasy elements of the program helped them recognize previously unacknowledged aspects of themselves.

The role of the arts in professional education: Surveying the field

Abstract Many educators of professionals use arts-based approaches, but often explore this within the confines of their own professional disciplines. This paper consists of a thematic review of the literature on arts and professional education, which cuts across professional disciplines in an attempt to identify the specific contribution the arts can make to professional education. The review identified five broad approaches to the use of the arts in professional education: exploring their role in professional practice, illustrating professional issues and dilemmas, developing empathy and insight, exploring professional identities and developing self-awareness and interpersonal expression. Woven through these approaches we found that the development of a more sophisticated epistemology and a critical social perspective were common outcomes of art-based work in professional education. Arts-based approaches may help learners to make a critical assessment of their own roles and identities within professions, and to consider the impact of professions in shaping the broader society.

‘Friends are the family we choose for ourselves’ Young people and families in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The young people at the centre of Buffy the Vampire Slayer present themselves as an alternative family that contrasts with the programme’s conventional families. This device helps to raise awareness about changing family structures in contemporary Western society, particularly with respect to the family’s capacity to facilitate the development of young people. The series implies that the stability associated with the nuclear family is often illusory and/or achieved at the price of young people’s freedom and agency. The alternative structure, by contrast, answers the call for the ‘democratisation’ of the family (Giddens, 1999) and is coded positively in spite of many weaknesses.

The art of freedom in HE teacher development

ABSTRACT This paper considers the benefits of framing the education of Higher Education teachers as an art, and of facilitating a creative and artistic approach to teaching in Higher Education. It recognises the difficulties this poses in an international context in which Higher Education is increasingly presented as a commodity which must be standardised to provide guaranteed outcomes for students and governments. It presents the findings from a study of two cohorts of academic staff at a UK University who followed an arts-informed development programme and suggests that they and their students benefitted from the freedom to improvise and experiment. The study suggests that teachers appreciate the structure and discipline offered by the arts, as well as the opportunity to work with methods and materials outside their normal comfort zones.

Popular Fictions as Critical Adult Education

This chapter discusses the popular fictions that adults encounter during their everyday lives as forms of critical adult education. It argues that engaging in close textual analyses of popular fictions is an educational project. Textual analysis that uses an educational lens to evaluate the educational potential, purposes and strategies of popular fictions can illuminate them as critical educational curriculum in terms of content and teaching methods that could be attributed to them. It can also connect this content and these teaching strategies with the shifting social, historical and ideological contexts within which they are located. Such work is of necessity interdisciplinary, drawing on the methodologies and theoretical frameworks found within literary, film and television studies. The argument is illustrated with a discussion of examples from the work of Barbara Kingsolver, Joss Whedon and Suzanne Collins.