Abstract
This chapter introduces the Anthropocene not only as an ethical and epistemological but as an educational challenge. It reviews the role of storytelling and interpretation in education and critically assesses notions of inter- and transcultural learning in times of climate change. In order to reshape the notion of transcultural competence, it introduces the concept of ‘text models’ as a heuristic device derived from reading literary fiction and argues for a qualitative form of literary pedagogical research that generates its key categories through the reading of texts.
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Notes
- 1.
It has been a deliberate decision not to distinguish too sharply between learners of English as a second or foreign language, native speakers in a literature class, or even members of book clubs, as one reviewer suggested. Although differences in learners and learning groups matter a great deal without any doubt, assuming generalisations about aptitude, interest, and learning outcomes is to be beside the point here. After all, I am not using texts to generate learning tasks but try to follow their potential as models for rethinking the tasks of reading and imagining across scales. It will be the teachers’ prerogative to decide which materials and methods will prove successful with a specific learning group—for now, I can happily imagine a book club of lay readers, native speakers of English and a motley crew of people who have acquired English by other, institutionalised means: their shared interest would be to learn in how far ‘literature as a foreign language’ (Hunfeld 2004) instigates moments of transformative learning that turns derangements of scale into affordances.
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Bartosch, R. (2019). Anthropocene F(r)ictions: Transcultural Ecology and the Scaling of Perspectives. In: Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33300-3_1
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