Literary art as experience: teaching young adult literature, moral inquiry, and the personal journey toward meaning

Because we all read and understand what we read in different ways, understanding the role of personal experience is vital to the process of making meaning. Yet current educational practice devalues the significance of individuality and personal experience in the classroom. This is due, in part, to the gap that exists between theory and practice, where those who work in the classroom find little relevance in the theory discussed and researched on the university level. This dissertation is an attempt to begin bridging this gap. Yet current educational practice and theory also neglects to recognize the teacher as an experiential being with individual needs and desires. Through moral inquiry, the author reflects on his own personal experiences to arrive at a philosophy rooted in John Dewey's Theory of the Aesthetic Experience and Louise Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory of Response. Using this philosophy as a foundation, the researcher reconstructs a practical theory that validates personal experience and the role of this experience in creating meaning. After critically analyzing his experiences in the reading, teaching, and understanding of A Separate Peace, the researcher conducts a Reader-Response study at Blacksburg Middle School in which eight seventh-graders read and react to Park's Quest. The researcher finds that although each student reacted and understood the novel in his or her unique way, all exhibited an ability to inquire and all responded at a variety of points along the efferent/aesthetic continuum. As a result of analyzing these results as well as his past experiences in teaching, the researcher discusses his own stance in the study, characterized by the dilemma of being an experiential being who wants his own feelings and beliefs validated and of being a teacher who wants to allow his students the freedom to explore their own feelings and beliefs about what they read. The researcher concludes by exploring the significance of his findings in the study on teacher education and the relationship between universities and practicing teachers.