Teaching Character Education through Literature: Awakening the Moral Imagination in Secondary Classrooms

This book shows how secondary and post-secondary teachers can help students become more responsive to the ethical themes and questions that emerge from the narratives they study. It helps teachers to integrate character education into the classroom by focusing on a variety of ways of drawing instructive insights from fictional life narratives. The case studies and questions throughout are designed to awaken students moral imagination and prompt ethical reflection on four protagonists motivations, aspirations, and choices.

The book is divided into two parts. The first provides a theoretical approach while the second features case studies to apply this approach to the study of four literary characters:

• Sydney Carton from Tale of Two Cities
• Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby
• Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice
• Janie Crawford from Their Eyes Were Watching God

The questions, ideas and approaches used in these case studies can also be applied to protagonists from other narrative works in the curriculum.