Abstract

I examine and defend stories as learning opportunities and explore their impact on representations of poverty. First, I outline the territory of aesthetic education as demarcated by Maxine Greene and John Dewey. I explore the functions of two essential components of aesthetic experience, metaphor and imagination, arguing that stories have the capacity to link differences of circumstance and character by sharing common experience. Second, I direct the learning potential implicit in stories to education about poverty. I focus on the ways in which poverty is represented and how it is addressed by the international development efforts of wealthy countries. I explore the ubiquity of quantitative descriptions that probe solutions for poverty as if it were a problem of numbers. In this discussion, I contrast economic descriptions with narrative ones in an effort to understand how poverty can be re-envisioned to better represent the poor as people. Third, I combine the strengths of a narrative pedagogy with the need for re-representing poverty by viewing them through the lens of Paolo Freire's critical pedagogy. I examine the extent to which stories constitute opportunities for radical transformative education, opportunities which may contribute to a critical awareness of one's circumstances and one's agency to affect them. I conclude by arguing that stories should be a fundamental part of education about poverty because of their capacity to humanize representations of the poor through empathy. An original work of fiction is included and examined for the learning opportunities defended in the main argument