What teachers say about using literature to explore conflict in students' lives

This inquiry explores community college English teachers' views and attitudes about conflict in the classroom. It further explores if and how they utilize the dynamics of conflict that bear on the characters' lives within literature to illuminate students' understanding of how conflict might work within their own lives. Classrooms, as microcosms of society, reflect society's diversity, conflict, and lack of empathic bonds. Fortunately, classrooms can also provide opportunities to learn from these features of social and personal life; notably, students and teachers in English classrooms can learn much from literature about how diverse parts of self can interact and integrate into a more knowledgeable self, and how very different selves can relate to 'other selves.' This learning implies both handling conflict with understanding and using conflict to increase social intelligence, the ability to fruitfully reflect on individual and shared experience.;Fifteen representative community college English teachers were interviewed twice regarding their background, art, and practice. After the initial interview, five of these fifteen teachers incorporated an intervention into their classes, and then we met as a group to discuss results. The main question at that point was this: How do teachers, particularly community college English teachers, encourage or fail to encourage the expression of different views and a corresponding process of interaction with and utilization of conflict presented in literature and its study as an authentic stimulus for growth?;Analysis and sifting of the interviews to discern the major themes and underlying factors revealed in detail how a traditionally strict linear social code (one that values the scientific dimension with its intellectual manifestations and devalues and excludes the non-linear human dimension--art with all its emotive associations) basically sets the stage for destructive rather than constructive conflict. Moreover, this domination and devaluation of the non-linear by the linear was seen to promote pervasive, unremitting self-conflict, accompanied by a devaluation of the human inner self. Further, this attitude of self-devaluation tends consistently to project outward to devalue others' human selves. As a result, the interactions and flow of information essential to handling conflict slow to a stop. Here the more traditional (subject-oriented) teachers tended to emphasize society's strictly linear code in their practice and generally suppressed any emergent conflict. In contrast, the more non-traditional (student-oriented) teachers were willing to incorporate and to explore non-linear elements within their practice and to facilitate their students' learning both individually and in relation to one another. The tendency of the latter group was also to deal with the literature itself in ways more attentive to inner workings.