Ethical education based on fiction and fictionality

Abstract

The purpose of this text is to investigate how pupils in school year nine use fiction to discuss pre-given issues related to ethics. Do they limit themselves to associating freely based on the textual content they encounter, or do they use the literature as a ”special form of knowledge” in the sense that they see opportunities to deepen and develop their ethical reasoning based on the potentials of the text as fiction? If it is the case that the students use literature as something more than a ”communicative instrument”, in what ways could they be supported to develop their reasoning on ethics based on the fact that it is a fictional text that they use in their conversations? In order to illustrate possible answers to these two issues, theories based on literary literacy (Frederking et al. 2012) are used, i.e. theories in which the fictionality of the fictional text is highlighted (Eco 1990, Genette 1997). In light of the results, the use of semantic, idiolectic and contextual literacy is discussed.