Utilizing Literary Texts in Teacher Education to Promote Positive Attitudes toward Children with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders.

MA body of professional literature shows that teacher attitudes and expectations toward children with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) are often stereotypic and negative (Boucher & Dino, 1979; Hannah & Pilner, 1983), and that negative expectations breed futility in both students and teachers (Brendtro, Brokenleg, & Van Bockern, 1990). Children and youth with EBD are assigned a multitude of negative traits. They are described as aggressive or anxious, attention disordered or affectionless, unmotivated or uncooperative, drug abusers or dropouts. Such terms are either overtly hostile or patronizing in an established tradition of blaming the victim. Our growing understanding of selffulfilling prophecies or the "Pygmalion effect" suggests the deleterious impact of pessimistic approaches to children with EBD. It has been posited that professional texts in special education with their predominant empirical philosophy do not fully engage readers in confronting stereotypes or in examining their own values, beliefs, and expectations toward youth with EBD (Bower, 1981; Landau, Epstein, & Stone, 1978). Empiricism is aimed at collecting and refining data; discovering correlations; and formulating testable empirical generalizations, hypotheses, and models toward the discovery of law-like principles. Within this world view, the teacher's task is to study children deductively, independently, with neutrality, and with controlled subjectivity. The professional text, bound by form and intent, offers a range from formal discourse to narratives of educational phenomena that can "name" a problem or a solution but cannot embody a potential experience that can be realized in the imaginative participation of the reader's experience (Kasprisin, 1987). The use of literature may be one imaginative way to provoke reflection in teacher education students, which in turn, might improve expectations and responses toward children with EBD. Literature provides an intimacy where we can learn how a child with EBD views himself or herself, and what he or she has in common with all of us can become more clear. Differences then may take on less importance, and stereotypes and categories may become less relevant. As an advocate for the use of literary texts in medical education, Trautmann (1982) maintained that literature provides a more imaginative world than the professional text, broadening and heightening our view of the world, offering psychological and moral journeys, with impasses and breakthroughs, with decisions made and destinations achieved. Coles (1989), a psychiatrist, noted that literature has a moral force, a visionary side. Wear (1989) proposed that literary texts can portray the difficult and frequently unexamined complexities of the lives of children and their teachers in ways that are unaccessible in the more clinical third person language of the professional text. As Bruner (1985) indicated, there are different ways to learn. He suggested that as learners, we may have come to value only one kind of thinking-the linear or the logical. He emphasized, however, two modes of learning: the narrative and intuitive as well as the logical and scientific, each differing radically in the way it establishes truth. According to Bruner, one verifies by appealing to the formal verification practices of empirical proof, while the other establishes nonproof likenesses. The logical/scientific mode leads to textbooks and journal articles, while the narrative/intuitive leads to stories and drama dealing with human situations. The two modes utilize language differently; the logical mode uses precise, descriptive language leading to cause and intervention; the narrative mode uses imaginative language dealing with intention. They constitute two simultaneous landscapes which, if we are to really understand reality, must both include the way we view the world. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a literary text-based course in EBD on preservice teachers' attitudes toward children with EBD. …