Moral Emotions and Human Interdependence in Character Education

Beyond the One-Dimensional Self

Agnieszka Bates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367503307
• eBook ISBN: 9781000390346
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

Moral Emotions and Human Interdependence in Character Education challenges contemporary mainstream approaches to character education predicated on individualism, 'essential virtues' and generic 'character skills'.

This book synthesizes perspectives from phenomenology, psychology, cultural sociology and policy studies into a unique theoretical framework to reveal how ideas from positive psychology, emotional intelligence and Aristotelian virtues have found their way into the classroom. The idealized, self-reliant, resilient, atomized individual at the core of current character education is rejected as one-dimensional. Instead this book argues for an alternative, more complex pedagogy of interdependence that promotes students' well-being by connecting them to the lives of others.

This book is an essential read for academics, researchers, postgraduate students and school teachers interested in character education and social and emotional learning.

Part I

Character education: a critique

Chapter 1

Diverse disciplinary perspectives underpinning Social and Emotional Learning and character education

As I write this book, the world is in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, UK schools are under lockdown and the passing days and weeks have been marked by statistics on infection rates and death tolls. Of all the lessons to be learnt from the Covid-19 crisis, perhaps the most critical is the need to understand our interconnectedness. This can be seen in terms of our global interconnectedness as the pandemic rapidly spread from Wuhan to engulf the rest of the world and more localized forms of interconnectedness relating to communities and the value of mutual support in a time of crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic raises numerous questions about our values, including educational values relating to Social and Emotional Learning. In particular, the dominant narrative centered on character traits such as self-reliance, resilience, ‘grit’, aspiration, positivity and optimism now appears superficial and one-dimensional. Despite the taken-for-granted assumption that it is not emotionally intelligent to be angry (Goleman 1995), we have witnessed the unifying role of morally-driven public anger at perceived government mis-management of Covid-19 in England, and high-profile breaches of lockdown rules by those who appear to have disrespected the nation’s collective effort and sacrifice. Here, the paradigm of the atomized ‘I’ was called into question by the paradigm of the interdependent ‘we’: my concerns were no longer about the implications of my actions for me alone but also for us, as my well-being became entangled in our collective hope, fear and grief. Although this book is obviously not about Covid-19, the crisis has spectacularly highlighted the importance of our interconnectedness and, by implication, the critical and heretofore neglected role of moral emotions and human interdependence in character education.

Chapter 1 outlines the key assumptions concerning the role of moral emotions in character formation and introduces the overarching themes of the book: the individual in society; childhood and child development and the pedagogies of character education. It also discusses the terminology of ‘emotions’ and ‘character’ developed within diverse disciplinary discourses. Most matters relating to Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) and its sub-category of character education may be regarded as falling within the field of psychology. However, cultural sociology, philosophy and psychoanalysis also offer important understandings of how the development of character can be supported in schools. Examining ideas and assumptions about ‘character’ from the perspectives of diverse intellectual traditions enhances our appreciation of the multiple dimensions of character. It also exposes problems arising from approaches to character education which are grounded in research generated within rigidly defined disciplinary boundaries.

The emergence of emotions work in Social and Emotional Learning and character education

The formation of character has persisted as a distinctive purpose of education, even though the methods and approaches to character education have undergone numerous shifts. This book evaluates key developments in character education, as a sub-category or branch of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). The emergence of SEL as a ‘field’ in educational research, in the USA and other countries, is associated with the publication of Promoting Social and Emotional Learning: Guidelines for Educators (Elias et al. 1997) and the launch of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) in 1994 (Osher et al. 2016). Examples of now well-established SEL programs dating back to the mid-1990s include the American Knowledge is Power Program, the Penn Resilience Program and its English counterpart, the UK Resilience Programme. By 2003, there were 242 nationally available prevention and positive youth development programs in the USA (Elias and Moceri 2012). A new, US-based Journal of Character Education was launched in 2003. In 2012, the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues was founded in England and subsequently became home to over 30 scholars engaging in research and developing resources for character education grounded in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics (Arthur et al. 2017). The year 2015 saw the publication of the 600-page Handbook of Social and Emotional Learning (Durlak et al. 2015) which invited contributions from over 90 researchers and accelerated SEL as a research field with significant influence on education policy and classroom practice. Two years later, Frydenberg et al. (2017) published a 450-page volume on Social and Emotional Learning in Australia and the Asia-Pacific. The circulation of curricular resources, prevention programs and SEL interventions in ‘positive psychology’ (Seligman 1991, 2002), ‘growth mindset’ (Dweck 2006) and character education (Lickona 2004; Duckworth and Yeager 2015) has been facilitated by their prominent authors. Psychological theories have also been popularized by science journalists such as Daniel Goleman (1995), author of the international best seller on Emotional Intelligence. To capitalize on the rapid growth of the ‘happiness industry’ (Davies 2015), for-profit technology companies started providing individual schools and entire school districts with digital platforms for tracking data on social and emotional learning and developing students’ social awareness, emotions regulation, ‘grit’ and ‘growth mindset’. For example, at the time of writing, the American tech giant Panorama Education claimed that their data services supported over 9 million students in 11,500 schools across 46 states in the USA, as well as 15 countries throughout the world (Panorama Education 2020).

Despite the spread of SEL, concerns about students’ emotional and mental well-being continue to be raised at regular intervals by international organizations (WHO 2013; OECD 2017) and a decline in well-being has been reported in some countries. In the UK for example, one in ten students has been identified as at risk of experiencing anxiety, depression or self-harm (DOH/DfE 2017). According to the Australian mental health report 2012–2018, 24% of 15–19-year-olds meet the criteria of ‘psychological distress’ (Mission Australia 2019). In 2018, the UK’s 15-year-olds reported the lowest levels of life satisfaction compared to students in other European countries, with exam pressure and fear of failure cited as key factors (The Children’s Society 2020). These concerns have given rise to therapeutically-focused interventions and apps designed to help users to manage negative emotional and mental states such as stress and urges to self-harm (NHS 2019). It appears that a perverse dynamic has been created in education systems that generate extreme levels of pressure and distress and then apply interventions to promote student resilience as a ‘protective shield’ (Fenwick-Smith et al. 2018: 2).

In this context, ‘character education’ has emerged as a generic term to denote programs in moral values, ethics and citizenship that receive significant support from policymakers in countries such as the UK, the USA, Canada and (as ‘values education’) in Australia (Shenfield 2016). Whereas Social and Emotional Learning is shaped mainly by the knowledge and methodological approaches generated by psychology, character education has also drawn from philosophy, especially Aristotelian virtue ethics and Kantian deontology (Lapsley and Yeager 2013). The term ‘SEL’ thus encompasses a range of approaches to Social and Emotional Learning and the enhancement of educational well-being. However, in recent years, SEL and character education have followed a similar direction of travel in terms of the quantification and measurement of emotions and character. For example, both approaches recommend the use of psychometric data for the common purpose of ‘training’ students’ minds in compassion, happiness or resilience similar to training bodies in the gym (Layard 2007). The collaboration between behavioral psychologists, data scientists and economists has yielded a range of behavioral interventions to develop character ‘skills’ for the employment market, such as the ‘Big Five’ set of skills: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and emotional stability (Heckman and Kautz 2013; OECD 2017). Driven by a belief that ‘what you measure affects what you do’ (Forgeard et al. 2011: 79), the ‘new science’ of happiness (Layard 2005) relies on measuring well-being. For example, some researchers have for some time now worked on developing ‘units of happiness’ to inform cost-benefit analyses of policies for increasing well-being (Helliwell et al. 2015). A similar pull towards interventions, measurement and tracking of ‘essential virtues’ required to lead a good life (Lickona 2004) can be observed in character education (Arthur et al. 2017).

The reductive view of ‘character’ as a fixed set of measurable character ‘skills’ has given rise to ‘emotions work’, educational practice focused on direct instruction to develop the ‘ideal’ self: a positive, resilient, productive, high-achieving, self-reliant individual. This ‘ideal’ individual is ‘one-dimensional’ in the sense of pursuing the positive and suppressing the negative dimension of experience, as well as brushing aside conflicting motivations and desires. Emotions work relies on techniques for regulating negative emotions, ‘off-the-shelf’ manuals for teaching about character and high-tech apps for modifying behavior that obviate the need for a deeper understanding of character. Crucially, emotions work is targeted at students as individuals, negating the vital importance of the social context within which character develops. By elevating achievement-driven character traits to moral virtues, emotions work creates a number of moral problems. Its narrow focus on personal goals may encourage students to become self-absorbed and inward-looking (Smeyers et al. 2007). The advocacy of resilience and optimism ‘against all odds’ may engender an inflated self-perception of one’s own capabilities and indifference to the condition of others. When emotions work recasts moral values such as compassion as measurable behavioral traits, they can be inculcated in students without a deeper moral engagement or authentic connection to others (Furedi 2009). In the pursuit of the ‘ideal’ self, feelings of inadequacy or failure may arise in children and young people, with lasting consequences for both individual and societal well-being.

A moral emotions approach to character education

Part I of this book is, therefore, devoted to exploring the issues raised by contemporary approaches to SEL and character education aimed at the individual and neglecting human interdependence. Part II develops an alternative approach to character education, grounded in a phenomenology of moral emotions. Here I draw on the methods and insights yet to be explored in character education, offered by phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 2010; Steinbock 2014; Welsh 2013). The phenomenological method relies on suspending taken-for-granted assumptions to see how meanings are constructed in our everyday encounters with others (Steinbock 2014). By adopting other perspect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Character education: a critique
• PART II: Phenomenological understandings of moral emotions and character formation
• Index