For millennia it has been discussed whether literature appropriately can or should be used in education for a moral purpose. Taking as a premise that it can actually be educative and not merely moralising, we tackle the case made against such use, based on the claim that it would be perverting the aesthetic nature of literature as a form of art, as it would be instrumentalised. Given that this claim is based on a dichotomy between an aesthetically educative approach and (...) a morally educative approach to literature, we examine how warranted such a formulation of this dichotomy is. We argue that, at least on some occasions, those two educative approaches to literature—the aesthetic and the moral—can actually be mutually reinforcing in such a way that aesthetic appreciation will suffer if the moral is not deeply examined with both mind and heart, and vice versa. This does not mean, however, that this relation of mutual contribution will always obtain in a neat way. It may actually be the case that just in a few cases, and only if carried out in a pedagogically appropriate manner, it will be correct to use literature with a morally educative purpose. (shrink)

Paul Hirst’s idea of moral education is distinctive in the central role it attributes to social practices. For him, ethical principles and virtues should not be seen as abstract entities theoretically derived and then applied in education so that students learn to reason from those principles or live by those virtues. Instead, Hirst’s moral education incorporates an initiation into social practices and comes back to them by means of situated critical reflection from within those practices themselves. Embracing Hirst’s proposed central (...) role of social practices, this paper spells out the key role that emotions play in moral education so understood and their relations with social practices. As emotions materialize our deeply held values, incorporated into lived experience, their cultivation will not simply be a matter of deliberation, but rather of the practical exploration of social practices that can nurture and sustain them. (shrink)

Traditionally, research has been seen as a process in which particular cases are studied in order to produce generalisations that can later be applied to other situations. This is arguably the case, for instance, of plain statistical generalisation from samples to populations, but also of grounded theory, local theory and democratic theory. Other research approaches, such as case study research and action research, have challenged this conception and have formulated a process in which transfer takes place directly from particular cases (...) to other particular cases, thus bypassing generalisations. Nevertheless, I argue that, even in research on single cases, and regardless of whether it is descriptive, explanatory or normative, any piece of research unavoidably produces, supports, modifies, qualifies or refines generalisations in the course of a research project. These generalisations are constitutive of the very descriptions, explanations and normative justifications used to talk about the particular. Nevertheless, they vary in their degree of explicitness, certainty and complexity, as well as in the substantive dimensions they generalise on. The neglect of this characteristic in the educational literature may stem from the inductive assumption that knowledge in research is produced when one first finds something about one or more cases or situations, and then generalises (or does not generalise) the results to other contexts. But generalisation exists all along the process. (shrink)