The article explores how two cultural models which were dominant in Great Britain during the Victorian era – the model based on the philosophy of ‘technologically useful bodies’ and the Christian model of empathy – were connected with the understanding of disability. Both cultural models are metaphorically constituted and based on the ‘container’ and ‘up and down’ image schemas respectively. 1 The intersubjective character of cultural models is foregrounded, in particular, in the context of conceiving of abstract concepts such as emotions and attitudes. The issue of disability is addressed from a cognitive linguistic approach to literary analysis while studying the reflections of the two cultural models on the portrayal of the main characters of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. The studied cultural models appeared to be relatively stable, while their evaluative aspects proved to be subject to historical change. The article provides incentives for further study which could include research on the connectedness between, on one hand, empathy with fictional characters roused by reading Dickens's works and influenced by cultural models dominant during the Victorian period in Britain and, on the other hand, the contemporaries’ actual actions taken to ameliorate the social position of the disabled in Victorian Britain.
In the Republic of Croatia, the importance of intercultural education and competence-oriented curricula has gained momentum in the last decade, with children’s literature being perceived as an invaluable source of intercultural learning and a fruitful tool for an exploration of global cultural diversity. Given that empirical data indicate the importance of children’s age for selecting age-appropriate intervention methods that would help combat discriminatory and prejudicial views, especially during the period between early and late childhood, this paper explores the choice of authors and picturebook titles taught in children’s literary courses at six Croatian Faculties of Teacher Education (Rijeka, Pula, Zagreb, Osijek, Zadar, and Split) with the aim to determine how university instructors interpret multicultural children’s literature and to which extent their syllabi accentuate the potential of picturebooks in fostering future pre-school and elementary-school teachers’ intercultural competence.
The findings indicate a misalignment between the objectives of intercultural education and the racial and ethnic representation of authors and their characters, especially protagonists. Furthermore, intercultural competence is not a major learning objective in the analyzed university syllabi. The choice of authors and picturebooks indicates a clear preference for white North American and European authors and white characters and protagonists. These findings highlight the need for teacher-educators, i.e., university instructors, to rethink the nature of their learning objectives and study content and to expand their reading lists with more diverse voices that challenge the traditional models that have historically left many ethnic groups misrepresented, under-represented, or fully omitted from school and university curricula.
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