The article aims to demonstrate that the impact of fiction on adult learning could be illuminated by a deeper engagement with research into empathy. It recognises that the lifelong learning literature acknowledges the importance of empathy in adult learning and that discussions of the role of fiction in adult learning often refer to fiction's capacity to promote empathy. There is limited adult education literature exploring how fiction generates empathic feelings or how such feelings might lead to sustained changes in perceptions or actions. This article analyses an example of Hoffman's work on empathy to illustrate the benefits of engagement with empathy research. This analysis leads to a consideration of fiction's capacity to promote an involuntary empathy that can help adult learners develop deeper understandings of difference and of excluded groups. It also shows that an understanding of the factors that inhibit the development of empathy and enable individuals to justify the sufferings of others could be of value to educators. Finally it suggests that Hoffman's examination of conditions that lead to empathic anger is helpful for educators wanting to use the potential of fiction to encourage and promote action in the cause of social justice.
This chapter examines how the study of popular romantic fiction was used to transform students' understandings of the ways in which gendered identities are constructed and their perception of the way textual meanings are determined.
This study reports research into women students' reading habits and practices. The research demonstrates the interconnections between participants'attitudes toward reading and their personal and family relationships. It also reveals how they use their reading to explore issues that concern them as members of families and cultural groups and suggests that reading is a matter of desire, aspiration, and identity formation. This study argues that detailed qualitative research about reading identities could assist in understanding how mature students approach reading literary and other texts as part of their programs of study.Adult learners have developed reading preferences and built beliefs about the value of reading long before adult educators meet them in educational institutions. Reading is a hermeneutic rather than a technical act-an interpretive and intertextual process, shaped by the reader's expectations and experiences and by the social contexts in which it takes place (Graff, 1992). These expectations and experiences significantly affect how students read the texts we as teachers present to them. The findings reported in this study emerged from research that originally had a different, though related, focus: the contribution of literary study to the development of critical consciousness. I was observing women participants in a cultural studies course for evidence of changes in perceptions and values related to their study and collecting details about their reading habits and preferences to provide background for the research. These accounts of personal reading, however, proved rich and 261 CHRISTINE A. JARVIS is head of the
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