Drama, Narrative and Moral Education

Joe Winston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135709952
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teachers are expected to take responsibility for children's moral development, particularly in the primary years, but how best to go about approaching the issues? In this book, the author explores a classroom approach that uses both drama and narrative stories to explore moral issues: drama gives children an opportunity to work through moral problems, make decisions and take up moral positions; stories offer a resource for moral education whereby children can learn through the 'experiences' of those in the story. Through providing a number of case studies, the author shows how this may be done by practitioners in the lassroom.

Part 1

Theoretical Considerations

Chapter 1
Narrative and the Moral Life

Problematizing Moral Cognitive Developmental Theory

In the winter of 1987 educationalists around the world were shocked to learn that Lawrence Kohlberg, the most influential researcher into moral education of his generation, had committed suicide. This act was a poignant and ambiguous footnote to the life of an academic who had striven to establish the universal principles of moral development. In his later years, the epistemological vision which had underpinned his research had come under increasingly vocal criticism. His was a modernist project, founded upon a faith in grand theory and a belief in the existence of rational, universal laws to explain human development and human behaviour. In retrospect it is tempting to see his suicide as tragically symbolic, to view it if not as an admission of failure, then at least as a testimony to doubts in what he had achieved.

Lawrence Kohlberg was foremost of a number of theorists and researchers who attempted to apply cognitive developmental theories of learning to moral growth.¹ Rejecting both the teaching of moral habits, which he dismissed as the ‘bag of virtues’ approach to moral education, and also the relativistic-emotional approach, where children’s moral health is believed to develop naturally from the fulfilment of their emotions and needs, Kohlberg began his theory from a different philosophical premise. His claim was that, at heart, morality represents a set of rational principles of judgment and decisions valid for every culture, the principles of welfare and justice. In addition, he claimed that his research showed how individuals acquire and refine their sense of justice by passing through a sequence of six invariant developmental stages. These were divided into three levels which he named the Pre-conventional, theConven-tional and the Post-conventional Each stage, Kohlberg argued, is characterized by a particular structure of thinking and he proposed that moral development should be understood as linear progression, capable of arrestation at any level. What characterizes this progression, according to Kohlberg, is an individual’s increasing ability to reflect autonomously and selflessly upon the moral principles which need to be applied to specific moral dilemmas or problems.² The highest stage of moral development is reached when a person appreciates and is able to apply what he labelled as universal ethical principles, those principles which he argued any human being would agree to if able to view a situation quite impartially; in the words of the philosopher John Rawls (1977), ‘from behind a veil of ignorance’.

Kant had first proposed with his categorical imperative a universal principle of moral law based upon justice and reason; and that: ‘moral imperatives exercise absolute or universal and not merely particular or contingent authority’ (Carr, 1991, p. 81). Kohlberg’s understanding of morality was Kantian in its form but the source of his cognitive developmental approach to the acquisition of moral knowledge was the work of Jean Piaget. It was Piaget himself, in fact, who had first undertaken the task of structuring a theory to explain the universal principles of children’s moral growth (Piaget, 1932). Piaget saw rules as the basis of all moral action and suggested that his research showed a growth in attitude to rules and rule-keeping from heteronomy, where rules are given by external authority, to autonomy, where they are mutually agreed, accepted and internalized. Kohlberg openly acknowledged his indebtedness to Piaget and saw his own research as a continuation of the work he had begun. But he was not the only cognitive developmental theorist to gain credence during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; Selman (1976) and Loevinger (1976) both proposed stage theories to explain personal and moral growth but one of the earliest to do so was Erikson, who in 1950 proposed eight levels of development which he termed the Eight Ages of Man (Erikson, 1977, pp. 222– 43). There is rather more Freud than Piaget in Erikson’s theory, but, like Kohlberg, his developmental stages are heirarchical, sequential and culminate in a universal model of fully developed, moral humanity; in Erikson’s case, this highest stage of moral being is characterized by Ego Integrity, where, coupled with what he calls the virtue of wisdom: ‘The style of integrity developed by his culture or civilization thus becomes the “patrimony of the soul”, the seal of his moral paternity of himself’ (1977, p. 242).

Aware as we now are of feminist theory, we may well wince at the preeminence of male, patriarchal references in such a description of the moral universe. Of course, Erikson was writing before contemporary sensibilities had been subjected to a feminist critique of language usage; but it is this very need to judge it within the context of its time which undermines the universalist claims it makes.

Cognitive, moral developmental theories sought to establish objective, universal laws to account for the moral growth of the personality; however, it is far from proven that the structural categories their creators proposed were the fundamental laws they claimed them to be. The research of Margaret Donaldson, for example, has revealed a deep flaw in the overarching structure of Piagetian developmental stage theory which premised both his and Kohlberg’s moral projects. Donaldson showed that the rigid hierarchy of cognitive progression which Piaget claimed to have proven did not hold. For example, Piaget had observed an inability in children under the age of 6 to decentre, but Donaldson could describe tests which showed that, given situations which were contextualized in such a way as to make human sense, children much younger than 6 and 7 could, indeed, see things from another’s perspective (Donaldson, 1978, pp. 19–24). Her stress on the inadequacy of the research tasks set by Piaget, and his lack of recognition of the importance of contextual details in children’s thinking, were to have an important echo later, in criticisms of Kohlberg’s research methodology, as we shall see.

There is, of course, much that is empirically logical in many of the observations made by developmental theorists. So Kohlberg’s vision of the moral progression of the child which sees a movement from reliance on authority toward a position where one can oneself assume those responsibilities which pertain to the exercise of authority makes eminent and recognizable sense in our own, democratic, western society. However, this does not mean that such a progression is structurally implicit to moral growth for it assumes the human universality of the moral principles it promotes. Both Erikson and Kohlberg use a discourse which is notably modernist; rationalist, searching to provide an all-embracing grand narrative to explain moral action, irrespective of such important constituents of the human moral identity as culture and gender, and prescribing universal moral precepts which are tacitly but notably congruent with the values of western liberalism. Thus the perfect human being according to Kohlberg’s and Erikson’s moral categories would be an impartial, unprejudiced, calm, considerate philosopher, self-sufficient, autonomous and socially well-integrated, a perfect citizen in a twentieth century western democracy but somewhat out of place in Homeric Greece or, indeed, in a modern day, fundamentalist, Islamic community. Their theories are susceptible to a poststructuralist critique and to the criticisms, summarized by Benhabib, which characterize postmodern thought:

If there is one position which unites postmodernists from Foucault to Derrida to Lyotard it is the critique of western rationality as seen from the perspective of the margins, from the standpoint of what and who it excludes, suppresses, delegitimates, renders mad, imbecilic or childish. (cited in Nicholson, 1993, p. 19)

This does not disprove per se either Kohlberg’s or Erikson’s views of what constitutes the moral human being but it shows that the foundations of their theories are far from the value-free, objective perspectives they claimed them to be. In the postmodern world, grand theories are under siege from feminists, cultural minorities and the many voices on the periphery. The whole concept of morality argued by both theorists can be disputed from the perspective of any of these voices.³ It is unsurprising, therefore, that the most coherent critique of Kohlberg’s system has come from one of these voices, that of his onetime collaborator, the feminist moral researcher, Carol Gilligan.

Gilligan’s Ethic of Care and Narrative Moral Theory

In her book In a Different Voice, published in 1982, Gilligan claimed that, when developing his theories, Kohlberg’s research was gender-biased; she argued that both Piaget’s research into games and rules and her own subsequent interviews with female respondents revealed that a developmental theory which concentrated on the principle of impartial Justice was discriminatory toward the way women approached moral dilemmas. Her overall thesis, developed in subsequent research and publications, has been summarized by Flanagan and Jackson thus⁴:

Gilligan describes a moral universe in which men, more often than women, conceive of morality as substantively constituted by obligations and rights and as procedurally constituted by the demands of fairness and impartiality, while women, more often than men, see moral requirements as emerging from the particular needs of others in the context of particular relationships. (1993, p. 70)

This view of morality she defines as ‘an ethic of care’ and although her research saw it as expressed mainly by women, her intention was not to place men and women within different moral universes but to challenge Kohlberg’s Kantian view of the nature and origin of moral action.

For Gilligan each person is embedded in a web of ongoing relationships, and morality, importantly if not exclusively, consists in attention to, understanding of, and emotional responsiveness toward the individuals with whom one stands in these relationships. (Blum, 1993, p. 50)

Not surprisingly, Gilligan’s work has found favour with postmodernists and feminists, who see in it a powerful assault on the Enlightenment project. She has had a profound impact on the perspectives of feminist researchers into moral education (Noddings, 1984; Noddings and Witherell, 1991) and on others who have sought to view moral growth as other than linear in nature and hierarchical in structure. Instead, Gilligan and her followers have sought to place narrative at the centre of the moral life. A look at what Blum sees as the major differences between her own theories and those of Kohlberg is a useful prelude to understanding why this should be.

According to Blum (1993, pp. 50–3), there are seven such differences and I paraphrase them below:

1. For Gilligan, the moral self is thick rather than thin, defined by historical connections and relationships. Whereas Kohlberg defines the moral point of view as totally impersonal and objective, for her it is anchored in particularity.
2. For Gilligan this radical particularization of the self extends to the other, whose moral significance cannot be reduced, as Kohlberg would have it, to general categories such as ‘friend’ and ‘person in need’. Moral action, therefore, is irreducibly particular.
3. Gilligan sees the understanding of the other as a far more difficult and complex moral task than does Kohlberg and one that necessitates a stance informed by care, empathy, compassion and emotional sensitivity.
4. Whereas Kohlberg proposes a rational, autonomous self subject to the laws of abstract principle, Gilligan sees the self as ‘approaching the world of action bound by ties and relationships (friend, colleague, parent, child) which confront her as, at least to some extent, givens’. (ibid, p. 52)
5. For Kohlberg, formal rationality generates moral action, whereas Gilligan sees it as necessarily involving an inseparable intertwining of emotion, cognition and action.
6. Gilligan rejects Kohlberg’s universalistic principles of right action in favour of a notion of ‘appropriate response’, appraisable by non-sub-jective standards of care and responsibility.
7. For Gilligan, morality is founded in the caring connections between persons, whereas Kohlberg sees right principle as the initial touchstone from which moral action needs to be judged.

Gilligan, then, defines morality in terms of relatedness rather than autonomy and embraces particularity, complexity, and emotional attachment as opposed to Kohlberg’s insistance on universality and rationality. In her vision, justice and care co-inhabit morality and we need to listen to and explore a multiplicity of moral voices if we are to understand its nature and its processes in different socio-cultural contexts. Viewed in this light, moral knowledge is not apprehended and understood through the exercise of reason alone; it is too disparate and complex a form of knowledge to fit Kohlberg’s developmental paradigm. She and her followers argue that narrative story-telling is the form best suited to hold and convey such knowledge. To understand why, we need to appreciate something of the cognitive nature of narrative and its pervasiveness in our lives.

Narrative, is present in every age, in every place, in every society…narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural; it is simply there, like life itself. (Roland Barthes, 1977, p. 79)

In the words of Barbara Hardy (1977), narrative is a ‘primary act of mind’, which implies that it is one of the key ways by which we attempt to organize and make sense of our experience. Jerome Bruner (1986) has argued that there are, in fact, two modes of thought or ways of knowing, the one paradigmatic, the other narrative, each of which provides a distinctive way of ordering experience and of constructing reality. Bruner proposes that the concerns and parameters of the two modes of thought are very different. We judge a story using criteria distinct from those we use to judge a scientific hypothesis. Whereas the latter strives for well-formed, logical argument, for universal truth conditions, the former aims for verisimilitude. Inquiring more specifically into the narrative mode of thought, he suggests that ‘Narrative deals with the vicissitudes of human intention’ (ibid., p. 16) and that the narrative imagination leads to: ‘good stories, gripping drama, believable (though not necessarily “true”) historical accounts’ (ibid., p. 13). Arguing that we should regard the self as deeply cultural in its nature, he draws the following conclusion:

Insofar as we account for our actions and the human events that occur around us principally in terms of narrative, story, drama, it is conceivable that our sensitivity to narrative provides the major link between our own sense of self and our sense of others in the social world around us. (ibid., p. 69)

Given Gilligan’s emphasis upon the socio-cultural embeddedness of moral knowledge, her belief that it is founded and constructed within particular relationships of care and connection, then narrative discourse as defined by Bruner becomes the natural form through which we make moral sense of our lives. Like Gilligan, Bruner sees such knowledge as simultaneously rational and affective, enabling us to ‘perceive, feel and think at once’ (1986, p. 69). Narrative, therefore, can convey the messiness of reality and the moral life and also something of its thickness and complexity.

Theorists and researchers who have been influenced by Gilligan have concluded that it is through the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Theoretical Considerations
• Part 2: Theory and Practice in the Classroom
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3