Educating for Cosmopolitanism Lessons from Cognitive Science and Literature

by Bracher, Mark

• ISBN13: 9781137392268
• ISBN10: 1137392266
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781137390202
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-10-31
• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• More Book Details

Summary

Drawing on recent findings of cognitive science, Mark Bracher here employs widely taught literary texts - including Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Voltaire's Candide, Camus's "The Guest," and Coetzee's Disgrace - to provide detailed demonstrations of how literary study can be used to develop cosmopolitanism, defined as a commitment to global justice. Cosmopolitanism, Bracher explains, is motivated by compassion for peoples who are distant and different from oneself, and compassion for them is dependent on perceiving their need, their deservingness, and their humanity. These perceptions are often prevented by faulty mindsets, or cognitive schemas, that can be corrected by the pedagogical practices described here.

Author Biography

Mark Bracher is Professor of English at Kent State University, USA. His most recent previous books include Literature and Social Justice: Protest Novels, Cognitive Politics, and Schema Criticism; Social Symptoms of Identity Needs: Why We Have Failed to Solve Our Social Problems; and Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation.

Table of Contents

1. What is Cosmopolitanism, and How Can Education Promote It?
2. How Cognitive Science Can Help Us Educate for Cosmopolitanism
3. Correcting Ethnocentric Prototypes of Self and Other with Achebe's Things Fall Apart
4. Developing Metacognition of Ethnocentrism with Lessing's "The Old Chief Mshlanga" and Voltaire's Candide
5. Correcting Faulty General Person-Schemas with Things Fall Apart, "The Old Chief Mshlanga," and Candide
6. Developing Cosmopolitan Action Scripts with Camus's "The Guest" and Coetzee's Disgrace