English Stories and the Moral Dilemma: Incidental Narratives and the Pedagogy of Critical Thinking
A fundamental goal of higher education is to teach students to think critically. Education, when it works well, produces independent thinkers who can evaluate ideas and make rational decisions. Furthermore, this goal of higher education is congruent upon the higher goal of establishing an informed citizenry in a democracy. But critical thinking, even at the best of times, is a difficult thing to teach. At its core is the notion that a healthy, informed skepticism is a necessary part of disciplined reading, listening, and inquiring. Thus difficult questions, paradoxes, and hard–to–solve problems (dilemmas or ethical issues) are a key to this pedagogy, to helping students learn the habit of critical thought and engagement. The use of incidental narratives—stories we might tell to a class in order to pose a question, stimulate thought, or make a point—are often an important, perhaps even essential, method of instruction in critical inquiry or practice.
Through the following stories and observations, then, we are making a case for the efficacy of such narratives in the classroom. We will present our observations from two separate disciplines: English and psychology. In English, such narratives may be legendary accounts of famous writers, or they may be stories related to teaching itself, perhaps even the instructor’s learning. In psychology, similar narratives have been used to demonstrate the development of moral or ethical faculties in people, a sometimes difficult and occasionally painful task. Each of these narratives has its own virtues, purposes, and attractions, but all have been used effectively in classes for years. Interestingly enough, sometimes they also engender a sense of mystery in students’ thoughts, and this too seems a pedagogical advantage in terms of generating interest, capturing attention, and stimulating speculative thought—another key to effective critical discourse.
I: Stories Used in the English Classroom
To make discussions of the following narratives easier to follow, we will refer to them as “The Frost Story,” “The Stevens Story,” and “The Kousaleous Story.” Following the narratives as a whole will be a brief discussion of their meanings and practical pedagogic implications.
In the Frost Story, poet Robert Frost finishes the reading of one of his poems at Harvard University’s library only to be asked by a graduate student, “Yes, but what does the poem mean?” Frost responds by saying, “It means . . .” and then proceeds to read the poem again in its entirety.
In the Stevens Story, a fan of the poet Wallace Stevens is said to have journeyed a long way to Hartford, Connecticut, to visit Stevens in his office at the large insurance company where he worked. The fan has a discussion with Stevens, but upon leaving the front door of the insurance company pauses before the most junior clerk sitting at a small desk near the door and says, “My God! Do you realize who you have in there?” The clerk looks up and replies, “Let me tell you something, pal. I write better insurance than that guy does.”
The Kousaleous Story is a personal account of Scott Minar, one of the authors of this article. He tells the story in this way:
When I was a graduate student in the 1980s, I came out to the hallway of Ohio University complaining about the fact that my students were not learning how to use semicolons effectively, despite the fact that I had devoted a substantial amount of class time on three separate occasions to the issue. My colleague, Professor Peter Kousaleous, responded with the following story: “During World War II, I was a Marine Sergeant stationed in the Pacific theater. My job was to get soldiers onto the beach during the day, order the digging of foxholes, and get them into them before we moved into the jungle at night. I told all of them that no matter how hot it became or how bored they were, they had to keep their helmets on and stay in the foxholes throughout the day because there were snipers in the trees at the edge of the jungle. Invariably, somebody would get hot or bored, take his helmet off, and go sit under a palm tree, only to be shot by a Japanese sniper. There I was telling people things trying to save their lives, and they wouldn’t listen to me. And you’re complaining because your students won’t listen to you about semicolons?”
Meanings and Pedagogic Implications
Regarding the Frost Story, one might observe that poetry is a difficult art, so it is not crazy to suggest that poems mean themselves or, to put it another way, “exactly what they say and suggest.” If we do not understand a poem, we have to experience it more and think about it longer. Frost seems to imply through his response to the inquiry that we shouldn’t turn to an outside source, and particularly not the author, for affirmation or explanation. Frost appears to be both teaching and making an artist’s statement here. In part, his response may also suggest that poets themselves don’t know what their poems mean, but they may be more familiar with what they are: these words, in this order, sounding this way, and suggesting these ideas or emotions. This implication may be more nebulous than suggesting what poems mean in any definitive sense. Poets may well be attracted to the nebulous, to ephemera because this is where they often find poetry. The act of writing a poem is often an exercise in trying to understand that which may be beyond us; this is what T. S. Eliot referred to as the attempt to “say the unsayable.” It may also help to consider poetry’s competitor: prose. Exposito ry prose is by definition and convention definitive; poetry, on the other hand, is suggestive, intimative. It is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the various elements that make up a good poem: the music of the words, the suggestive quality of the images and statements, the look of the poem on the page and how that affects the reader’s steady consumption of the music, the words and their meanings, i.e., the poem as a whole. Good poems are organic in the literary sense. If you take an organ out of the body, it gets sick or dies. Frost may be suggesting a similar idea about the relationship between poetic art and the analytical method. Some poets believe that to distill a poem down to its meaning as one might state that in a sentence or two of prose is actually to make the poem less, to weaken it through inadequate translation. Thus, Frost’s deceptively simple or seemingly absurd response—a kind of paradox— may represent a significant argument from the writer’s or art lover’s point of view. The pedagogical value of deciphering Frost’s actions here may be quite high. The narrative presents a difficult mystery to unravel, but the intellectual rewards of doing so may be profound.
The Stevens Story appears to play with the notion that the relationship between poetry and the real world is notoriously insubstantial. It is not a prominent or important feature in the lives of most people. So this story accomplishes two things. First, it brings comic relief to the notion of a poet’s importance in the world outside of academia. (The suggestion is that such an importance often doesn’t exist. In the context of the narrative, Stevens may be a great poet, but he’s a lousy insurance underwriter.) This humor is ironic: writing great poetry should be more difficult than writing insurance—considering that we could probably count the number of great poets alive in any single nation on one hand. However, we might also view this irony as being doubled. To put it another way and in the terms of literary theory, this story also seems to “deconstruct” itself: Stevens, it appears, is actually appreciated by the higher–ups at his insurance company, so the narrative is double– edged. The strong implication at the narrative’s end is that Stevens’ bosses are keeping him on because he is a famous poet and certainly not due to his capabilities as an insurance underwriter. The narrative’s humor, charm, irony or “self–deconstructing” quality may be different ways of describing a similar group of narrative features. This story thus both possesses charm and constitutes an interesting exercise in critical inquiry, with the latter found in simply trying to unravel its narrative implications.
Finally, the Kousaleous Story appears interesting on a number of levels. One of its illustrative principles seems to imply that few of us estimate the teaching of writing at the level of difficulty it actually occupies for the practitioner. For a number of reasons, it is a difficult and vexing job. Yet teachers perhaps can ill afford to think that way. They, it seems, can only keep spirits up and attitudes healthy in the attempt to accomplish something in the classroom. Yet when students don’t learn, teachers more often than not appear to blame themselves. How much of this blame is justified? One reasonable answer may be only half of it; this estimation seems reasonable, given the sharing that goes on in the two sides of the educational process. There is a difference between teaching and learning, and teachers must be constantly aware of that difference and act or perceive accordingly. The final analysis seems to indicate that if teaching doesn’t work out the way one might wish it to sometimes and if a teacher has done his or her best, then he or she should sometimes accept the limitations of the profession itself, of the difference between teacher and learner. Each has a role to play; each is responsible for a part of the process. The Kousaleous Story has the unique feature of being both an interesting counterexample for students and reality check for teachers. When used as a critical and pedagogical device in the classroom, however, it can also be somewhat awe–inspiring and possess the capacity to move students emotionally and motivate them through its somewhat morbid but nonetheless interesting comparison.
The Heinz Dilemma and Developmental Psychology
From a psychological standpoint, critical thinking entails metacognition, the evaluation of multiple perspectives, and placement of the self in relation to these perspectives. Metacognition is thinking about one’s own thoughts and mental processes. When you know that you don’t know the meaning of a word you just read, or you realize that a desire you harbor is self–serving, metacognition is at work. In addition to metacognition, a critical thinker must apprehend the differing perspectives that may exist regarding an issue. For example, the critical thinker knows that some people believe that gender differences are physiologically and perhaps even genetically determined. Others believe that society and a person’s upbringing are the primary determinants of gender differences. Weighing the arguments pro and con constitutes an evaluation of the differing positions. Placement of the self in relation to these perspectives means that the critical thinker reaches a decision as to which position she or he finds most convincing.
One theory about the development of critical thinking proposed a progression in the sophistication of thinking that follows a stage–like pattern. William Perry (1999) established a scheme in which students progress through nine positions. The beginning position is dualism, in which knowledge is viewed as a collection of information and ideas are either true or false. Dualistic thinkers view the role of instructors as imparting their special knowledge of what is true to students. As education proceeds, the student’s thinking advances toward a middle position of contextual relativism in which knowledge is not connected to absolute truth. Truth exists only within a specific context and is evaluated by the reasoning that supports it. Several different points of view may be equally legitimate. At the final position, commitment, the thinker acknowledges the different viewpoints but judges for herself or himself which is favored. In a sense, the thinker sees herself or himself as an authority.
Gender may play a significant role in the progression of students toward thinking critically, and Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986) posit a set of categories of thinking based on data collected from female respondents. In the received knowledge category, information and truth come from authority figures. In a different category, subjective knowledge, knowledge is acquired and possessed by the thinker from personal experience. Procedural knowledge refers to thinkers who may differ in the procedures they use to acquire knowledge. Some strive to be objective and independent while others seek to connect with people to share in their experiences and knowledge. The category of constructed knowledge describes individuals whose rational or scientific thought processes generate knowledge.
Baxter Magolda’s (1992) Epistemological Reflection Model, based on data from both males and females, described patterns of thinking that are related to but not determined by gender. In the absolute knowing pattern, there is certainty about what is correct and the instructor’s job is to communicate that information. In transitional knowing, students accept knowledge as partially uncertain and strive to understand it. In independent knowing knowledge is accepted as uncertain and everyone has their own beliefs, although the thinker does think for herself. In contextual knowing, the thinker evaluates different perspectives and supporting evidence. Students view themselves as working together with teachers to progress in understanding.
Fostering Critical Thinking in a Psychology Class
At the present time, many instructors actively strive to promote critical thinking in their college classes, and resources exist to advise them (e.g., Baxter Magolda, 2000; Elder and Paul, 2002). In a psychology class that covers the topic of human development, it is possible to employ an exercise derived directly from the material being covered. The study of moral development began with Piaget (1932/1965) whose work was built upon by Lawrence Kohlberg (1963). Kohlberg assessed moral reasoning by posing a series of moral dilemmas (Colby and Kohlberg, 1987). Each dilemma was presented as a brief story in which a question was posed at the end. By inviting the class to resolve a moral dilemma, instructors may encourage students to think critically.
One of Kohlberg’s dilemmas is known as the Heinz Dilemma. It is easily recited to a class and proceeds as follows:
Heinz was a man who lived in Europe, and whose wife was dying from cancer. There was one drug which might save her, and a druggist living in the same town as Heinz had discovered it. The druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. Heinz went to everyone he knew to borrow the money but could only get together about half of what it cost. Heinz went to the druggist to ask him to sell it to him cheaper or to let him pay the rest later. The druggist refused, so Heinz, in desperation, broke into the man’s store to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have done that? Why or why not?
Class discussion of the Heinz Dilemma creates an opportunity for students to think critically by calling on them to analyze their own thinking, recognize different points of view, and place themselves in relation to a particular point of view. Lively classroom discussions of dilemmas are common and most students are willing to voice an opinion. Students are compelled to consider and evaluate differing perspectives. Interaction of a student’s reasoning level and peer influence may also trigger advances in thinking through modeling in which more advanced reasoning is heard from one or more members of the group.
Baxter Magolda, M. B. (1992). Knowing and Reasoning in College: Gender–related Patterns in Students’ Intellectual Development. San Francisco: Jossey–Bass.
Baxter Magolda, M. B. (Ed.). (2000). Teaching to Promote Intellectual and Personal Maturity: Incorporating Students’ Worldviews and Identities into the Learning Process. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Belenky, M. F., Clinchy, B. M., Goldberger, N .R. and Tarule, J. M. (1986). Women’s Ways of Knowing. New York: Basic Books.
Colby, A., and Kohlberg, L. (1987). The Measurement of Moral Judgment: Theoretical Foundations and Research Validation (Vol. 1). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Elder, L., and Paul, R. (2002). The Miniature Guide to Taking Charge of the Human Mind. Dillon Beach, CA: The Foundation for Critical Thinking.
Kohlberg, L. (1963). “The Development of Children’s Orientations Toward a Moral Order: 1. Sequence in the Development of Moral Thought.” Vita Humana, 6, 11–33.
Perry, W. G. (1999). Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme. San Francisco: Jossey–Bass.
Piaget, J. (1965). The Moral Judgment of the Child. New York: Free Press. (Original work published 1932)
Scott Minar is an assistant professor of English at Ohio University— Lancaster. His books include The Body’s Fire and The Nexus of Rain. His poems have appeared in The Ohio Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, TickleAce, Ariel, and other magazines and anthologies in the United States and Canada. He is the recipient of the Joseph Stein Award, The Emerson Prize in Poetry, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Joyce Carol Oates. He earned his Ph.D. at Ohio University and can be reached at minar@ohiou.edu.
Patrick Drumm is an assistant professor of psychology at Ohio University—Lancaster. His areas of interest include biological psychology, developmental psychology, and the history of psychology. He earned his M.A. at the University of Nevada—Reno and his Ph.D. at Ohio State University. He can be reached at drumm@ohiou.edu.