Literary Engagement z
The Use of Fictional Literature in Undergraduate Social Work Teaching
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dara Sampson
A key focus area for this PhD research project is, how, if at all, does a capacity to relate to, critically analyse, and engage in an emotive journey with fictional literature improve the understanding and practice of undergraduate social work students? Relationships, community, and social justice are key social work concepts. Research shows fictional literature to be useful in developing critical reflection; generating alternate stories; and exposing the reader to a range of human experience and emotion. It is this synergy which supports the development of social work students to become practitioners who are more able to excel at relationships-based practice. This paradigm (that of placing relationship building as key to success) becomes, then, a direct challenge to the hegemony of economic rationalism and neoliberalism which values output and pecuniary measurement. Methodology comprises: 1. Extensive literature review of current utilisation of fiction in undergraduate teaching, both within the realm of Social Work and cross-disciplinary; 2. Creation of a 'Book Club' with students within a framework of Participatory Action Research (PAR). Results suggest a breadth of disciplines (nursing, medicine, business, ethics, psychology, sociology) to be utilising the arts in teaching, however little systematic research has been done on the use of fiction in social work teaching. When literature was used as part of assessment tasks by the researcher, in particular a task relating to grief and loss, results were favourable in terms of student understanding of complex emotional and theoretical terrain.
Affect, Intellect, and the Active Reader: The Case of Henry Adams
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Orr
This paper investigates the reading habits of one of the United States’s great intellectuals of the late nineteenth century, Henry Adams. The grandson of John Quincy Adams, Henry was born into a political family but chose to pursue a career as an historian and belletristic writer. His most famous book is his autobiographical The Education of Henry Adams, long considered one of the best non-fiction books written by an American. I have audited (H.L. Jackson’s term) Adams’s marginal writings in his extant library, housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the results have led me to investigate what his comments can indicate to us about him as a reader. Adams was a voracious reader, claiming that he read a book a day, and his reading habits spanned history, literature, political philosophy, and modern science. Drawing on recent scholarship that attempts to bridge the gap between neuroscience and literary study, I argue that as a reader, Adams struggled with an affective response to certain books that he read, struggled because the marginalia indicate that he almost always overrode the affective response with an intellectual one. The result gives us a glimpse of the act of reading performed by one specific individual who prided himself on his fierce intellect. As such, the evidence supports theories of reading promoted by Karin Littau, among others.
Reading Habits of Bulgarian Students in Primary School Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lubomira Parijkova
This study provides research findings about some reading preferences and attitudes of Bulgarian students up to eleven years-old. This research is useful for people interested in the diversity of Eastern Europe’s reading situation. It may help with understanding the intersection of reading, culture, and social environment in a small country as Bulgaria, where students have the same favorite computer games as their peers around the world. The focus of the current publication is on reading in pre-primary and elementary school as a part of understanding the interconnection between reading and digital literacy (project “Digital competencies and Media education at preschool and primary school age”). The paper presents reading research, publication, and frameworks, about reading issue. The author describes the context of the research – the reading situation in Bulgaria, educational system, the most important documents relevant to reading. It also discusses investigations about reading habits in Bulgaria. The paper presents methodology, participants, procedure of the research, and results of it.
