Developing Criticality Through Reading Novels

Abstract

This chapter concerns individual students who come from a range of professions including coaching, teaching, environmental work, the police service, dog training, the maritime industry, airlines and charities. I encourage students to explore how their life histories have made an impact on their professional growth. In doing so, I suggest that they resist simplistic answers and instead try to embrace the complexity of their lived experience and question their previous assumptions while narrating their “stories”. I encourage them to use knowledge from a range of academic disciplines in a reflective way: my hypothesis is that reflective thought, properly guided, will foster change in terms of increased academic confidence. Furthermore, motivating students to read literature can help them become better communicators as they reflect on how fictional character—George Babbitt, John Stoner, Travis from Old Yeller—navigate the knotty issues and complex problems of life and work: reading novels is conducive to developing criticality. The students’ own testimony and work appear to suggest that learning and literature complement each other: stories enrich our lives and help us to interpret and understand others.

Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he laboured was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to learn.

—John Edward Williams, Stoner

First place, we ought to insist that folks call us ‘realtors’ and not ‘real-estate men’. Sounds more like a reg’lar profession. Second place—What is it distinguishes a profession from a mere trade, business, or occupation? What is it? Why, it’s the public service and the skill, the trained skill, and the knowledge and, uh, all that, whereas a fellow that merely goes out for the jack, he never considers the—public service and trained skill and so on. Now as a professional…

—Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt