Clinical ethics education issues elaborated by comparison with longstanding disagreements about how to teach reading literature in primary and secondary schools

DOI
  • HATTORI Kenji
    群馬大学大学院医学系研究科医学哲学・倫理学分野

Bibliographic Information

Other Title
  • 臨床倫理学教育と国語科文学教育

Search this article

Abstract

This paper explores elemental and methodological issues of young clinical ethics with reference to the longer history of pedagogical arguments about methods of teaching pupils to read literary texts. Although clinical ethics and literature are seemingly unrelated disciplines, we find it necessary and appropriate to draw an analogy between them, as long as we admit that literary imagination plays an important role in both clinical ethics and literature, and that both undertake the fundamental challenge to elucidate the nature of understanding of the given clinical cases or texts and elaborate the very basis of the plausible interpretation. Looking back at the literary education in primary and secondary schools in the post-war period, the following schematic is delineated: author-centrism based on hermeneutic psychologism or answerism which urges pupils to reach and accept one and only absolute interpretation vs. reader-response criticism, and objective but mechanical ways of reading with a set of analytical codes vs. subjective and imaginative ones. This framework extends to clinical ethics case deliberation in clinical settings as well as in classes. We argue, against answerism and stereotyped ways of understanding based on the mechanical application of interpretive strategies as the recent trend, that both clinical ethics and education should adhere to their inherent heuristic and reflective features and encourage professionals and students to freely change their subjective imaginative interpretations by paying meticulous attention to the nuanced details and surroundings of each clinical case in question.

Journal

  • Bioethics

    Bioethics 22 (1), 86-93, 2012

    Japan Association for Bioethics

Related Projects

See more

Keywords

Details 詳細情報について

Report a problem

Back to top